


Interlude VII

by Guede



Series: Theory [15]
Category: Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Hornblower (TV), King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Bickering, Breaking Up & Making Up, Class Differences, Dating, Drunken Confessions, F/M, Families of Choice, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Humor, Internalized Misogyny, Living Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Meeting the Parents, Multi, Past Child Abuse, Polyamory, Roommates, Smoking, Thanksgiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:34:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28621857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Growing pains don't stop after adolescence.
Relationships: Arthur Castus/Guinevere/Lancelot, Galahad (King Arthur 2004)/Mariette (Hornblower), Gawain/Tristan (King Arthur 2004)
Series: Theory [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058675
Comments: 8
Kudos: 2





	1. Ships in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2006.

Gawain dimly registered the sound of a door being opened, but didn’t roll over till he heard two more thumps: Tristan dropping his shoes on the floor. His feet got tangled up in something and he had to stop to kick at it. Then he switched to pulling his legs up when he realized that that was the blankets and that he probably didn’t want to rip them. He got free and cleared a space just as the mattress dipped under Tristan’s weight.

He probably should’ve been asking about Tristan’s day or at least saying hi, but the first few weeks of the semester always left Gawain feeling as if he’d been run over several times with a steam-roller, and this year hadn’t been any exception. But he did his best to move his hand around, just to show Tristan that he was alive, not ignoring the other man, and sorry about being so tired. Well, he hoped Tristan could get that from just a hand gesture.

Tristan laid down next to Gawain and poked his face into the crook of Gawain’s neck. His nose was cold, so Gawain flinched. But he grabbed Tristan before the other man could pull back and held him in place; the nose warmed up in seconds, and then Gawain was perfectly happy to be snuggling up to the other man.

After a moment, Tristan relaxed and slung his arm over Gawain’s waist. He pulled himself up so they were flush against each other, nuzzling at Gawain’s neck. His tongue flicked out to tickle just beneath Gawain’s ear; Gawain murmured and tightened his hold on Tristan’s head. So the other man outright licked at Gawain’s neck, and it felt good and Gawain didn’t want it to stop, really, but he just…he couldn’t…he was too tired to take it anywhere. He could feel Tristan pushing his hips up with increasing urgency, but Gawain couldn’t muster the energy to respond in kind.

It didn’t take Tristan long to notice and he abruptly subsided, pushing lightly to try and get away. Which Gawain wasn’t about to do, so he knotted his fingers into Tristan’s hair. “Sorry…sorry, really. ‘s not you—I’m just exhausted.”

“I know,” Tristan said. He stopped trying to get away, but he wasn’t exactly lying comfortably again. “I probably should—”

“Think you could put it off for fifteen minutes?” Gawain managed to dredge up enough energy to roll his head off the pillow and look Tristan in the eye. He untangled his fingers in order to run them through Tristan’s hair. “Missed you. Even if I’m kind of useless right now.”

Tristan didn’t do anything for a moment. Then he shrugged and let his weight fall onto the bed. After another second, he pressed up against Gawain again; tension was still running through him, but at least he’d relaxed enough so that he bent when Gawain tightened his arm. It wasn’t the best Gawain could do, but it seemed like it’d be enough for now.


	2. Linguistic Flexibility

Galahad pressed his hand to the side of his head. The printouts weren’t making sense, he couldn’t remember what programming language he’d used anyway, and somehow he and Mariette were fighting over her work schedule. She didn’t like it and it was his fault? “Look, if it’s such a big deal, I’ll call Gawain and see if he’s free. Probably is—Tristan’s got another week till he’s not nocturnal. Or I’ll see if Jack’s making any progress with Jess.”

“Mais ce n’est pas le point! Ah, merde, je ne sais—je suis si dans la merde, et—”

“And if you’re that busy, then it’s okay. I’ll come over tomorrow.” God, talk about discouraging him from ever trying to get together time again. “Jesus Christ, what’s the deal? You’ve canceled on me before and it’s not like I died or anything…fuck. I meant yeah, I was disappointed, but—oh, fuck.”

He glanced up, expecting to see Mariette ready to rip him a new one over not caring about her, but instead she was staring at him like he was an alien.

“What?”

“You…you just understood what I said. But you don’t speak French!” Mariette sat down hard in the chair across from him. The papers she was holding snapped up hard, then settled back down.

Galahad…just barely kept himself from rolling his eyes. His other initial reaction was to have a nervous breakdown, but then his work wouldn’t get done. “Mariette, how long have we been dating? I picked it up.”

“Why?” She looked really stunned.

Why? Why was this even a question? It made perfect sense to him. “Because you _speak_ French. A lot. In my old neighborhood, you couldn’t get electricity without speaking Spanish, so I learned Sp—”

She lunged at him. He lost hold of his printouts and they went everywhere, but at least he knew where his tongue was. And what it was doing, and…okay. He made a note to himself that commonsense apparently turned Mariette on.

They separated several long, sucking, hot seconds later. Mariette was halfway onto Galahad’s lap by that point; she brushed her hand down Galahad’s face and he turned into it, his headache getting a bit better.

“Screw my seminar. Come over, please.”

“Merci, mais tu ne doit pas faire ça,” Galahad snorted. “You’ll be cranky as hell. Really, just get it done and brag to me about it tomorrow, okay? You’ll feel better.”

After a moment, she nodded. Her hand tightened on his shoulder, but before he could do anything, she slid down and put her head on his shoulder. “I know. But I can take a nap now, I think…five minutes?”

Well, he had to get his work done, too, but…Galahad rolled his eyes at himself and nodded. And it was way longer than five minutes before he woke her up again.


	3. Time Management

Gawain finished unlocking the door and pushed it in to find a dark, empty apartment. Once again. His sigh had a little edge to it as he walked inside.

He really was sympathetic to the demands of Tristan’s job, and he’d meant everything he’d said about being patient, but he wasn’t a saint. And Tristan had been on the day shift for over a week now, and he still wasn’t home for much more than a fast shower and a few hours’ sleep. Supposedly things should’ve gotten better by now, but they hadn’t and no matter how hard Gawain tried, it was getting on his nerves.

He just wanted a firm date for when he’d start seeing Tristan—really seeing him—on a regular basis again. That was how he liked living. He liked schedules and planning ahead, and unlike Galahad he wasn’t any good at just living day-by-day. He sucked at improvisation.

But while he did have a plan for the evening that’d keep him busy, it also didn’t include Tristan at all, because Gawain had gotten so used to the other man not being home. And frankly, realizing that depressed him more than anything else, but standing around like he was just wasted time.

On the other hand, fifteen minutes of aimless poking around in the kitchen wasn’t exactly leading to dinner. Gawain couldn’t concentrate on what he was doing because every time he opened the fridge or picked up a package of meat, he was thinking about how much he needed and then he couldn’t help thinking about how he automatically decided that based on one person—

“All right, all right, fuck this,” he said. He stood up and paused for a moment, then closed the fridge door. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. Just being in the apartment wasn’t doing a damn thing except getting him more and more upset, and never mind the work he needed to do. He did have the whole weekend for that…and he rarely saw Tristan then either, since the other man was always getting called away or sleeping.

Gawain needed to get out and get some air, and maybe do something brainless. He grabbed his keys and headed for the door.

* * *

Even before Tristan opened the door, the warning bells were going off. He couldn’t hear any muffled TV or cooking noises going on behind it, and when he did walk into his and Gawain’s apartment, the place was dark and silent. Gawain’s bag was on the floor just inside, where he usually put it, and there was a pan out on the stove as if he’d started to think about dinner, but otherwise there wasn’t a single sign of the other man.

Tristan didn’t immediately assume the worst; sometimes Gawain had to go out unexpectedly, though usually he tried to leave Tristan a voicemail when that happened. But if he’d been in enough of a rush, or maybe if it was just an errand he’d almost forgotten and had run out to do, then he might not have had the time. But he still would’ve left some other kind of note.

Ten minutes later, Tristan had thoroughly checked the whole apartment and hadn’t found one. He took out his cell phone and tried calling Gawain, only to have Gawain’s bag ring. After ending that call, he phoned Arthur, but the other man told him as far as he knew, Gawain had headed home for the day. He’d also asked if Tristan was all right and if he needed to do anything, but Tristan just told him that he’d accidentally deleted a message from Gawain that probably would’ve told him where Gawain was.

Arthur didn’t sound like he entirely bought that, but he got off the phone so Tristan could sit down at the computer and also switch to one of the cell-phones that was safer for secure calls.

Within a few minutes, Tristan had a fix on Gawain, but it just…Gawain was at the house of another grad student. Not one he really knew that well as far as Tristan knew, and not someone who was in his department or the School of Education, where Gawain had been spending more of his time lately.

A couple more calls turned up an explanation that didn’t make things any clearer: said grad student was currently hosting a big house party, and while Gawain was sociable, he wasn’t really one for that kind of thing.

Well, maybe Galahad had dragged him to it. Though something about the way things were still bugged Tristan…he shrugged and got up, getting ready to head out to that address.

* * *

Galahad whooped, then grabbed Mariette around the waist and hugged her close, nuzzling her ear. He just had to demonstrate his appreciation of the sheer coolness of what he’d just seen, and since he didn’t think she’d like him blowing holes in her wall, he went with the next most fitting thing. “Jean Reno is a _badass_.”

“No, no, wait till Vincent Cassel comes in—wait, see? Keep watching. Mon Dieu, he has the best fight scene…” Mariette happily let Galahad man-handle her for once, and then returned the favor by glomping onto his arm and jerking at it every time Cassel’s character made a smart-ass remark. She wriggled her ass against his thighs and bobbed her head. “I’m so glad you don’t need the subtitles on now. It’s _so_ much better in the original French—”

Somebody’s cell-phone went off. For a moment, Galahad just sat there. Then it rang again, and he turned to see the same look of exasperation on Mariette’s face that he knew he was wearing. She made a face at him.

“It’s yours,” she grumbled, reaching for the remote. Then she added something about irresponsible and always turning it off before a film and blah, blah, bitching, blah.

She paused the movie while Galahad fumbled around on the floor till he hooked up his coat. He dug out the phone on its last ring and pressed the ‘answer’ button before he had a chance to see who was calling. “What?”

*Uh, Galahad?* Jack. Huh? Why was Jack calling? He was supposed to be glued to his couch watching some English soccer game on cable. *Listen, I’m sorry to interrupt your date, but Gawain just showed up asking for you and…and well, he seems…inebriated.”

“What is it?” Mariette pouted.

Galahad glared at her before he realized she couldn’t hear. He tried to make a ‘sorry’ gesture with his hand, then gave up and just hissed, “It’s Gawain—he’s _drunk_ at my place.”

Mariette immediately looked guilty, then switched to concern and snuggled in so she could hear the conversation too. “But he doesn’t drink! And when he does, he needs a lot.”

*Oh, hello, Mariette. I…um…sorry about this. I’d try and call Tristan’s number like you told me, except Gawain’s also upset and from what I can tell, it’s about Tristan.* Something banged in the background and Jack hissed like he was wincing. *I think he just locked himself in the bathroom. Gawain, I mean.*

“Go get a screwdriver—you remember how I showed you how to pop the lock? Make sure he didn’t pass out or do anything stupid like get his hair caught in the fucking toilet—we’ll be right over,” Galahad said. Then he realized he should probably ask, but by then Mariette was already off him and scooping up their coats. Honestly, sometimes he did kind of like her pushiness and inability to stay out of other people’s business. It did keep her trying to think ahead. “And, um, call Arthur—do you need his number? Ask him very nicely if he’s seen Tristan and don’t hyperventilate on him. Uh…just tell him what you know, and don’t say anything that’s just a guess. He’s pretty good at that by himself.”

Jack took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. He checked off items in a voice that was tense, but in a concentrating way, not a panicking one. *Yes, I can pop the lock. I’ll check on Gawain. I just found Professor Pendragon’s number. Okay, I’ll do that. All right. Thanks for not being upset.*

“Just…keep Gawain from doing anything till we get there,” Galahad muttered. He checked to make sure he had his keys and wallet, then turned off the TV while Mariette got the lights. “See you in a sec.”

He flipped his cell shut while going out the door. Mariette followed him a moment later, delayed by the problem of getting into strappy heels—first pair of shoes she’d grabbed, apparently, because it definitely wasn’t that kind of occasion—and locked up.

“What do you think’s wrong?” Mariette asked.

It was still so early in the night that a group of teenagers was playing kickball beneath one of the street-lamps. The ball skittered Galahad’s way and he absently punted it back towards the nearest boy as he walked towards Mariette’s car. “Tristan’s skulking somewhere around the city and I haven’t broken his neck yet.”

“Galahad!” Mariette grabbed his elbow and yanked on his arm, glowering at him. Then she nodded sharply, like she’d made some kind of point, and clattered ahead of him to get to the car first. She got the driver’s door open, plopped herself inside, and then stared pugnaciously out at him.

Rolling his eyes, he got in at the other side. “Okay, you can drive. Jesus.”

“No, the other one. We don’t know what happened yet, so we shouldn’t make judgments,” she muttered, starting the car. She put her hand on the gear-shift and pushed at it. The engine’s roar suddenly went crunchy and loud and Mariette swore in French, hastily adjusting it to reverse-gear. Then she hit the gas, peeling the hell out of there so Galahad had to grab for a handhold.

She usually was a cautious, careful driver to the point of making Galahad crazy, so yeah, he was staring at her funny. He was also trying not to shout for her to see the red light, and then trying to keep himself from hitting the dashboard. Actually, fuck this. If he didn’t say something, they were going to die and they only had six blocks to go. “Mariette! For God’s sake—you get us killed and you’re never getting to drive again, goddamn it!”

They screeched to a stop at another red light. For some reason, Galahad didn’t remember there being this many stoplights on the way…maybe they should’ve walked instead. Jack probably could’ve handled Gawain for an extra fifteen minutes.

After a moment, Mariette tipped her head to the side. She looked a little bit shocked, like she was just realizing what she was doing. “You believe there are cars in the afterlife?”

“Look, my thesis is about how Maynard Keynes’ economic philosophy’s really played out in the world economy, not about theology. Who cares?” Galahad had been bracing himself against the dash, but when the light went to green, Mariette accelerated at a nice, non-human-pulping speed and he decided it was safe to sit back. “What was that all about, anyway?”

“I think I just realized that I really was looking forward to tonight since we haven’t seen each other much, and I was annoyed,” Mariette said, voice a little faint. She sounded like she was having an epiphany, though thankfully she didn’t space out enough for her driving to go wacky that way. “But still you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

They turned onto the right street, so Galahad began to scan for parking spaces. He thought he spotted one farther down and briefly pulled himself up to look. “I’m not. This is totally an educated guess here. Gawain’s told me how much he misses Tristan and Tristan’s been on day shift long enough for his schedule not to be the problem. He’s doing something else wrong.”

“Not…necessarily.” Mariette found a place herself, but it was pretty tight so she had to spend a few minutes on inching her car into it. “It could be something else.”

“Yeah, but it’s not likely. I mean, what else could Tristan do that’d get to Gawain that much? Short of cheating on him, but even I don’t think Tristan would do that. He’s freaky like a wolf or whatever—you get his craziness for life,” Galahad said, rolling down one window. He leaned out to check how close she was to the car in front of her, then waved an okay at Mariette. Then he got out of the car and closed the door, turning around to hit the power window button and quickly removing his arm afterward so it wasn’t caught.

“It could be something Gawain did, and now he feels guilty—look, I’m just…um…” she switched to French “…playing devil’s advocate.” Back to English. “It’s just why are you thinking it’s Tristan first?”

Galahad just looked at her over the top of the car. If she didn’t know the answer to that by now, then he seriously had to wonder about her observational skills. And her long-term memory. Maybe she had a medical condition he should be watching.

After a moment, Mariette made a face at him. Her hair suddenly fell in her face as she bent slightly to lock the car door. She straightened up and irritably shoved at it, then pushed her fingers back to gather it up as she turned around; her bun had come undone. “I know, I know, but I thought you were okay with him now. You don’t even mind when he asks you to pass something on to Gawain…oh, wait, does this have to do with Gawain moving out?”

“Of course not.” Why would she think that? Where the _hell_ had that idea come from? Had he been bitching about Jack?

No, not that he could remember. Except for that little bit about Jack building up DVD-towers of taped soccer games that he’d watch in late-night marathons, and that was only bad because he tended to leave them where Galahad would trip over them in the morning.

“Really?” Mariette skeptically said. She let him get the door, then slipped in and had the elevator so Galahad could walk straight from the door into it.

“Really. I don’t have a problem with them living together—I just have a problem with Tristan being a jackass.” And Galahad knew he hadn’t been whining about Tristan lately. In fact, he’d made a point not to. Everyone seemed to think he had a problem with the guy and he wanted to make it clear that he didn’t, and so if he was pissed off right now, it was totally Tristan’s fault.

Once they got to Galahad’s floor, he got the door while Mariette fended off a curious neighbor who’d just wandered down the hall by playing up her accent and pretending not to understand English. She really had too much fun with that sometimes.

“Your hallmate is creepier than my hallmate,” she murmured, grabbing onto his arm. She pressed up and rested her chin on his shoulder.

“That’s why I don’t call ‘em hallmates.” Galahad carefully poked the door open and peered through the gradually-widening slit. He saw the kitchenette, a slice of couch, a whole mess of paper towels stuck to the floor…oh, God, if Gawain had puked on the carpet, Galahad was going to hold it over his head forever. The moment he sobered up. “Jack,” he hissed. “ _Jack_.”

A foot moved into Galahad’s view, and then suddenly Jack’s relieved face was pressed right up to the door. His sleeves were rolled up and the hair around his face was wet and plastered to his skin. “Oh, thank God. I just got him into the shower.”

“Is he awake? He’s not going to drown, is he?” The shower wasn’t running, Galahad realized. At least, he couldn’t hear it going, so he was extra careful not to make any more noise than he had to getting inside the apartment.

The moment he did, the sour smell of vomit hit him: man, Gawain was really drunk. It took him forever to get to the puking stage, but once he had, it was all downhill from there. Not that Galahad had really seen him like that very much, but the few times he had, they’d been pretty damn memorable.

Actually, the last time Gawain had gotten that wasted had been on the anniversary of Grandma Yvie’s death a couple years ago, when they’d still been waiting to hear back from Avalon and Gawain had just gotten fired from some shitty job.

“He accidentally spilled once before I got him into the bathroom,” Jack delicately said. He nodded towards the mess of paper towels on the floor.

“Ew.” Nose wrinkled, Mariette pushed off of Galahad and went into the kitchen area, where she started opening cupboards. “Do you have any…any…ah…club soda?”

“You deal with this, I’ll go handle ‘wain,” Galahad muttered, rolling up his own sleeves. He started to go, then paused. “Oh. Thanks. I—he almost never does this.”

Jack shrugged and ducked his head, rubbing at the back of it with his hand. “I thought it might be that. Eh, it happens.”

It shouldn’t, though. With a sigh, Galahad headed towards the muffled thumping sounds in the bathroom.

* * *

Arthur walked past the study, then stopped. He went back and leaned in the doorway. “Lancelot?”

The other man had been flopped back in his chair, absentmindedly rumpling up his hair while staring at a piece of paper he was holding over his head and at arm’s length, but the moment Arthur spoke, he straightened up. “Hmmm?”

“There appears to be a problem with Tristan. I think I probably should go find him,” Arthur said.

After a moment, Lancelot put the paper down and sat forward so he could rest his elbows on the desk. The diamond-smuggling ring case had moved to the judiciary arm of Interpol, but he and Guin were still spending hours on it getting their evidence into shape. Right now Guin was coordinating a meeting downtown while Lancelot prepared for another one in a few days. “Problem like you need someone to alert law enforcement?”

“No. No, it’s not that bad, so don’t feel like you need to stop working. I just would feel better if I knew where he is right now, so I’m going to go out for a half-hour or so.” It probably wouldn’t even take that long, except lately Arthur had been trying to be more circumspect; normally he could’ve done this without leaving the house. “I might end up needing to talk with him—if so, I’ll call and let you know.”

“Well, this isn’t that important, and I need a break anyway—”

“I really don’t want to interfere with your—”

Lancelot put his hands down hard enough to make sharp rapping sounds against his desk. He looked exasperated. “Arthur, it’s fine. If you don’t _want_ me to come because it’s Tristan and you want to be one-on-one with him, say that.”

“I—” Well, Arthur was feeling suitably chastened by now. He did try to put away the polished manners when he came home, but for a while now that’d been getting more difficult.

Something at the window grated, distracting both of them. It was a familiar enough sound to Arthur so that he merely withdrew so he wasn’t in its direct line-of-sight, but Lancelot was startled enough to jump completely out of his seat. He stumbled a bit, catching himself on the edge of the desk, and then stood up. After a good look at whoever it was, he relaxed with a half-ironic smile on his face. “Well, what do you know? Perfect timing as usual, Tristan.”

Tristan didn’t answer, which was slightly unusual for him. He typically ignored smart-aleck remarks, but he did tend to respond to Lancelot most of the time. Instead he walked around to where Arthur could see him, not looking very surprised at how close Arthur was, and then out into the hall.

Arthur glanced after him, then turned back to Lancelot for a moment; Lancelot was shutting the window

“I suppose I should break out the tea set?” Lancelot asked. “His car’s out front.”

“That’d be very helpful, thank you,” Arthur said, stepping back.

He followed Tristan downstairs and then into the kitchen, where the other man started to make himself a sandwich. Tristan lifted his head when Arthur came in, then went back to concentrating on what he was doing. His taste wasn’t all that picky, but even for him, combining peanut butter and ham seemed rather odd.

Arthur took a seat at the island and folded his hands together on the counter. A couple moments later, he heard Lancelot come in; the other man started taking tea-cups out of the cabinet. He passed behind Tristan and Tristan absently reached across the island to hook over the tea-pot for him, then continued working on the sandwich, which now had three layers.

“Am I hard to live with?” Tristan suddenly asked.

“No,” Arthur immediately said.

Lancelot paused, then finished setting the kettle on the stove. He wandered back over to Arthur and stretched out his arm to trail his fingertips over Arthur’s arm, though more as just touching base than inviting anything. From the sound of it, he got as far as the living room before he took a seat.

“You take getting used to, yes. You don’t have regular habits, yes. But I wouldn’t say you’re difficult.” Arthur picked up the jar of peanut butter before Tristan’s sandwich tower got so tall it toppled over of its own accord. “Did someone say that to you?”

Tristan shrugged and prodded his sandwich. “Not that way. Just that living with me’s easier to do when not sharing an apartment.”

Apparently Jack Hammond had been more than a little discreet in describing what he knew, because that took Arthur by surprise. He’d been under the impression that Gawain had been more than taking Tristan’s eccentricities in stride. “In what way?”

The right corner of Tristan’s mouth flicked up and then down, and at the same time, he ducked his head so his eyes couldn’t be seen. He moved his right shoulder around, trying to convey casualness, but instead it came off as stiff and angry. “In that I’m never around and he’s done as much as he can and he’s still miserable and I haven’t done as much as I can, and I haven’t been making up for what he had to give up in order to—yes, this is about Gawain. Have you heard from anyone yet? I think he headed home to ask Galahad if he could move back.”

“I…heard from Galahad’s roommate,” Arthur had to admit. He straightened up and put his palms flat against the counter, getting ready to get off the chair and around if he had to. “He said that Gawain was extremely drunk, to the point where he didn’t really know who he was talking to half the time.”

“Great. So there’s an even better chance that he was being dead honest with me.” Tristan suddenly stabbed his finger right through the sandwich so the pile started to fall away from him. He grabbed for it, then grimaced as the top third fell apart on him, getting peanut butter all over his hand.

At that point, Arthur slid out of his seat and started around the island with his hand out. When it was five inches away, Tristan flinched and Arthur paused, then lowered his hand for the moment since it didn’t look like Tristan was about to do anything else. “Would a game of pool work right now?”

“No,” Tristan snapped. His face still was set in an emotionless mask, but his eyes were beginning to flicker. “I like your pool set and I don’t want to break it.”

The kettle started to whistle; Arthur quickly moved over to it and poured it over the leaves in the tea-pot. “Tristan. What happened?”

Tristan stood there for another minute, still holding the disaster of a sandwich in his hands. Then he grimaced and lifted his hands, shaking them to get what he could off his fingers. He moved over to the sink and started to wash his hands. “I think Gawain broke up with me.”

The water flicked off his fingers so hard that some of the drops ricocheted almost all the way out of the sink. Arthur had been half-watching the clock for his tea, but now he just forgot about that and went over to stand behind Tristan. He reached up, but Tristan suddenly turned around and shoved his head into Arthur’s chest and…Arthur slowly put his arms down around the other man. He gave Tristan one squeeze, then loosened up and just let him lean.

* * *

Actually, Jack had gotten Gawain half-stripped and mostly rinsed up, which made Galahad revise his valuation of his roommate up a couple notches. Not that he didn’t think Jack was a nice guy, but he hadn’t figured on this much…well, ‘grit’ seemed the wrong word. Stoicism? Stiff upper lip? Just plain Britishness?

Whatever. Galahad sighed and knelt down by the side of the bathtub so he could brace himself enough. He reached over, pushed aside Gawain’s hair till he found the other man’s shoulders, and then yanked him up. Hard.

“Fucking _bastard_ ,” Gawain snarled, ripping himself away. He did that so hard that he banged right into the other side of the tub, then slumped, cursing to himself. After a moment, he lifted his arm, but instead of rubbing the back of his head—which had slammed the soap-holder pretty hard—he pressed it to his face. “Who…?”

“Me. Jesus Christ, you look like shit. You look like you drank a whole frat’s worth by yourself.” And then went to a couple funerals afterward. Honestly, Tristan had better have hit Canada and be communing with the wolves by now, because if he was still in town, Galahad would…would…it would be pretty fucking bad. “What happ—whoa, Gawain! ‘wain!”

Gawain had started to slide over again and Galahad made a frantic grab for him. He got Gawain’s arms, but the other man still was pulling downwards, and after a moment Galahad realized that was deliberate and not the alcohol getting to Gawain. He tugged at Gawain, but all that came up was a muffled sob.

“Galahad?” Mariette called through the door. “How is—”

“Water, icepack, lots of towels,” he snapped. Not over his shoulder, so he hoped she’d managed to hear him.

Well, she didn’t come in, but he didn’t hear if she left because he was busy getting first one leg and then the other over the edge of the tub. Galahad dug his hands down and got them hooked under Gawain’s arms, then hiked the other man up so he could fit in the tub as well. 

“Okay, what did he do?” he grunted.

The moment he got near enough, Gawain basically collapsed on him. He’d still been squatting and that sat him down hard so his ass hurt, but Gawain was this big, booze-smelling puddle of misery so Galahad just ignored that. “I told him I wanted to move out. I—Galahad, I was trashed. I think he thought I meant _move out_ move out, and now I can’t—call him.”

“What? What did he do?” Holy shit. Just…holy shit.

“He just…wasn’t around,” Gawain muttered. “I don’t know—I was tired and he wasn’t home again, so I went to a party so I wouldn’t feel lonely and I drank too much and then he showed up and it was so _bad_. God, Galahad. When did I turn into an idiot?”

He still was sniffling, and his hands were fisting in the back of Galahad’s shirt; Galahad hugged him as best he could, but frankly, he still was kind of flattened. It just—it just kind of was like Gawain and Tristan had turned into a real _thing_ , and maybe it’d been only a year and half, but somehow it’d ended up just as hard to picture Gawain without Tristan as to picture life without Gawain. “Um, I don’t know.”

“You are so goddamn awful at comforting people,” Gawain half-snarled, half-choked. He dug his fingers into Galahad’s shoulderblades and moved his head so he was pressing his brow into the point of Galahad’s shoulder.

“So you guys fought? Was it in front of everyone—which party? And hey, why didn’t you call me if you were—”

“Because you and Mariette were having a night and you get to see her only a little more than I get to see Tristan.” Gawain slowly stopped moving, except for his fingers that were still kneading Galahad’s shoulders. His voice got softer, too. “How are you two, anyway?”

Didn’t lack for bitterness. “We’re fine. Mariette’s in the kitchen with Jack.”

“Oh, shit. ‘m sorry,” Gawain mumbled.

Galahad suppressed a sigh and patted Gawain awkwardly on the back. Yeah, he was bad at this, but he usually wasn’t the one doing it, after all. He thought he was doing okay just not freaking out at the sight of Gawain…well, freaking out. Because Gawain never freaked out. It was like a law somewhere. But the universe hadn’t ended yet, so…life still sucked. “It’s okay. What did—”

“I’m not used to being by myself. My God, even during all the gang wars and when we were running around with bullets in us and everything, you were still around. You have—you have no _fucking_ idea how terrified I was, and it wasn’t ‘cause I thought I’d die. It’s ‘cause I thought you might, and then—and then I wouldn’t know what to do.” The words just came tumbling out of Gawain, low and almost incoherent because of how he was smushing them into Galahad. But even if Galahad hadn’t been able to make them out, he still probably would’ve understood them because of the emotion pulsing through every one. “I know he is. I know he’s been making it on his own for a long time, and I’m trying but I’m not him, okay? I can’t do that. I’m sorry but I’m not that good.”

“Well, it’s pretty shitty to ask you to be—”

“I know it’s different for him to live like this, and I was so fucking _happy_ when he asked if I wanted to try moving in together because I really, really love him. Really, Galahad. Like, for forever I was kind of glad you were dating around like crazy because I didn’t want you to move out and leave me alone, but then there was him and I was okay. I’m totally happy for you and Mariette.”

“—um, me and Jack, kind of, since me and Mariette aren’t exactly living—”

“And I tried to live like him, so I wouldn’t stress him out too much because really, he doesn’t need me. He’s proved he’s okay without anyone, and I’ve proved I’m not and I’m just a lot of extra baggage and I just wanted him to come home first for _once_. I told him that on the driveway, because even drunk I don’t want to hurt him in front of people, and he just…he…he was ‘I can cut down my hours after I talk to my boss but it’ll still be another week because I just moved to day-shift and they won’t want to change them again’ and I was ‘I don’t want to ruin your life’ and he was ‘well, that’s the only way I can come home more.’”

Galahad just stopped trying to say anything and held onto Gawain while the other man rocked, spilling out flood after flood of words.

“And I don’t want to do that to him! But I was drunk, and I was pissed off because nothing was working, no matter which way it was, there’d still be a downside and I just said that when I was living with you, it wasn’t this hard. And it wasn’t, but I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t. But he just went blank and I was too fucking angry to stay and figure out what his reaction really was and I left.”

After that, Gawain dug his chin into Galahad’s chest and pressed forward so the bridge of his nose started to really hurt Galahad’s shoulder. He sobbed a couple more times before finally going limp and just lying there, exhausted. The echoes of his crying quickly died away, leaving behind a strained, heavy silence.

“You’re not moving back in with me,” Galahad finally said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened his eyes to stare at the tile. The soap looked all smashed on one side, and when he checked the back of Gawain’s head…yeah, soap smear all over the hair there. He reached over and turned on the faucet just enough to get a trickle, then started rinsing that out as best he could. It was a good excuse for shoving Gawain’s head back down when the other man tried to look at him; this was hard enough without having to deal with that. “You can crash on the couch for a few nights if you have to, but really? You need to go find Tristan and apologize, man.”

“What…but…”

Galahad took another deep breath so he’d be able to get it all out before Gawain recovered enough to interrupt. “No, look. You love him. You’re like, crazy in love with him, God knows why…but anyway, I kind of have a feeling that Tristan said the wrong time at the wrong time and he didn’t really mean it like changing his hours again would fuck up his career. But even if he did—the guy loves you back. He’s kind of a moron sometimes, but that’s fucking life. Relationships suck sometimes. You can’t just leave them alone and think they’re gonna be nice all the time.”

The bubbles stopped foaming up, so Galahad figured all the soap was out. He turned off the water; he had to take his hand off Gawain’s head to do that so Gawain finally lifted it to look at him. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem pissed off about the bitching he was getting. “Are you sure?”

“About what? You and Tristan’s whole weird thing? Well, yeah—he’s a fucking nutball who makes you really happy most of the time. About relationships being a pain in the ass? Yeah,” Galahad said. He stopped to think back and see if he’d missed anything, then remembered. It kind of hurt to smile, but he did it for Gawain anyway. “If you moved in, you’d be so fucking depressed I’d probably end up killing you. You’d _never_ see Tristan then, and just right now…”

After a moment, a weak smile pulled at Gawain’s mouth. His eyes were still wet, but he seemed to be getting himself back to—he suddenly grabbed the back of Galahad’s head and yanked him forward into a rib-crushing hug. “Thank you,” he fervently whispered.

“No problem,” Galahad said after a moment. “And goddamn it, next time _call_ me before you decide to get fucking wasted.”

Then Gawain tried to get out of the tub, and that was an entirely different comedy of screams. In the end, they had to call in Jack to help. After Gawain did go out, he and Jack stumbled down the hall to see if he could borrow something clean-ish from Galahad’s closet while Galahad sat in the bathtub for a little longer.

Mariette wandered in, saw his face, and immediately came over to sit by the side. “Are you okay?”

“I really hate being the adult sometimes,” Galahad finally said. He ran his hand restlessly along the edge of the tub. “I miss him, you know. I’m not that used to living without him there all the time. But I can’t…I want him to be happy. I don’t know, maybe I’m turning into a non-selfish person. Which is kind of scary.”

For some reason, she didn’t bring up their earlier conversation. Instead she just grabbed his hand and held it in place, then leaned so she could put her head on his shoulder. “You do a very good job of not letting him see.”

“He’s been having a hard time. I gave him tons of trouble when we were younger, so I guess I’m kind of making up for it? I—oh, fuck this. I need to get out; Jack’s all nervy and Gawain’s still too drunk to drive, and I know he’s gonna want to get to Tristan right away now,” Galahad snorted, getting up.

Before he could straighten all the way, Mariette grabbed him by the face and gave him a sweet, long kiss. She started giggling halfway through for no good reason, but it was infectious and he chuckled a little, too. Her nose bumped against his, and then she slid it up and down the side of his nose while her lips rocked over his mouth. They ended up standing up together, still playfully kissing.

“I love you,” she whispered, sounding a little more serious. “I know I complain a lot about your habits, but you’re so—so good inside, I’m only wanting to see it.”

“Well, the outside’s not leaving any time soon.” He kissed the tip of her nose.

She wrinkled it, then gave him an arm to help him out of the tub. “I suppose it makes sure I have things to talk to you about all the time.”

“Oh, man, don’t start now…”

* * *

Tristan rarely ever cried, and when he did, he always seemed to feel ashamed that he had and immediately retreated into his flattest monotone and most expressionless face. It predated when Arthur had taken over caring for him, and no matter what Arthur did, he hadn’t been able to persuade Tristan to change, so he’d stopped trying. For all he knew, it might just be an intrinsic habit.

“And that’s what happened,” Tristan finished. “I didn’t make it work.”

Arthur looked down at his tea-cup, which he was rapping rather hard against the saucer. “I don’t think that’s the problem.”

“Considering what he said?” Eyebrow raised, Tristan reached for the tea-pot.

He looked startled when Arthur knocked away his hand, but that crack wouldn’t last long enough by itself. So Arthur then grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward, speaking fast and urgently. “What he said wasn’t pleasant. Neither was what he’s apparently been going through, but it isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes it’s downright horrific. And then when that happens, you don’t know that it’s over just from how awful it was. You know when they don’t show up again afterward. You know it’s love when they do, and when after all’s said and done, they’re still willing to look you in the face and go again, whether that’s another fight or a reconciliation or a…or anything. Anything except walking away.”

“So I should go to him? Wait for him?” Tristan asked. He was struggling to put the deadpan back on, but his emotion was coming out in his eyes and the tightness around his mouth. “What—”

“I can’t—” Arthur took a breath “—I can’t tell you that. I’m not you or Gawain, I don’t know what’s gone between you. All I can say is that it’s not a matter of making it work—it’s a matter of making it keep working. But whether you think that’s still possible or not…you have to decide, Tristan.”

He let go of Tristan then. The other man wavered, then put his hand down on the counter next to the other one. He leaned on them, looking at the tea-pot but not really seeing it, for several minutes. Then he finally nodded and turned towards the front of the house just as a car screeched outside. Tristan went stiff, then headed out at a near run.

Lancelot ducked in almost in the same second, looking a bit wary. “So…everything all right now?”

“I have no idea.” Arthur pressed both hands to his face, then slowly dragged them back over his hair. His chest hurt for Tristan and he was wishing very hard, but it was almost physically painful not to call out a clear suggestion to the other man. “God. Parenting never ends, does it? And I only started when he was seventeen, but it already feels like it’s been from birth.”

“Well, the gray hairs are how you know you really care,” Lancelot said, sidling up to Arthur. He ruffled Arthur’s hair, then leaned up against him. “Not that you actually have any, wonder of wonders. You should.”

“I’m not that old, I’d hope.” The front door opened and Arthur heard a flurry of voices, then a sharp drop in noise. He waited a while, and just when he was about to go out and check, Galahad wandered back into the kitchen.

His eyes shot to Lancelot and he backed up a bit, then stopped. “Oh, hey. Just wanted to see who was home…um, Gawain and Tristan are talking on the stairs, and they’ve gotten past the ‘I was a jackass’ stuff so I think they’ll be okay. But I kind of…Mariette and I took her car here, and Gawain’s still a little…”

“Tristan drove here. If he doesn’t feel like he can drive back, I’ll take care of it,” Arthur said.

“Oh. Okay. Okay, I guess.” Looking uncomfortable, Galahad wandered back out. He wrapped his arm around Mariette easily enough once he was in the hall, so Arthur decided he was fine, too.

Lancelot squeezed his arm around Arthur’s waist. “All’s well that ends well?”

“The point is that it _doesn’t_ end,” Arthur muttered.

“Well, yes, but there’s also the point where you need to drink tea yourself and have a moment’s rest. Come on, they’ll be awhile,” Lancelot said. He let go of Arthur and walked around to get himself a cup, then nudged Arthur’s barely-touched one towards him.

After a moment, Arthur took it. He did need it.

* * *

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to move out—I don’t want to ever leave, but the thing is—it felt like I had. Like you wouldn’t have noticed.”

“I know, I know. _I’m_ sorry that…it went that far. Gawain, I can have my pick of jobs. I can quit right now and still be fine doing other things. And I will—”

“—but you really like this one.”

“I like you _more_.”

“…I’m really stupid. I’m going to be hung-over soon, too. I’m just…sorry.”

“…I thought you were fed up with me for good. The last time I felt that awful was when my mother died. I…I love you, and I know that I’m not normal and I don’t understand why you want that when you could have a regular life, but—”

“God, _c’mere_ \--” long, fumbling-desperate kiss “—God, I taste bad. I can taste it in your mouth. I’m sorry. I’ll—look, soon as I get some toothpaste—”

“I don’t _care_.”

More kissing.

* * *

Guinevere came home during Arthur’s third cup and Lancelot’s second, looking tired and puzzled and exasperated all at once. “Arthur, Tristan and Gawain are dangerously close to having sex in the stairwell.”

“They had a fight. Leave them be—we’ll just screw Arthur there on the way to bed and rechristen the place,” Lancelot mumbled, greedily stuffing biscotti into his mouth.

Arthur had to put up his hand to keep from laughing. After a smack at Lancelot’s head, Guinevere slumped into a chair. She gratefully accepted the tea Arthur offered her, then leaned her head against his hip.

“So they’ve settled it?” she eventually asked, looking up at him.

“For now,” he replied.

“Well, that’s the best you can do sometimes.” She sighed and turned her head so she was resting it on her cheek, then sipped at her tea. “But really, can we chase them out now? I’d like to work on us before I fall asleep.”


	4. Parental Contribution

“I don’t know, man. She’s just been off all week—one minute she’s shoving me and the next she’s, well, _shoving_ me. You know.” Just in case the message didn’t get across, Galahad cocked one eyebrow and coughed theatrically into his fist. He kept his hand up afterwards, and in the end started to rub its knuckles against his mouth. “Not like I object to that part, except it’s just—like, if it’s because something bad’s coming down and she wants to make it up to me in advance, I’d rather have a warning.”

Jack stared at his anatomy textbook, frozen with his pencil-eraser between his teeth. It tasted rather awful, but if he took it out, he’d have to say something and he wasn’t prepared at all to do that. He’d been studying on the couch when Galahad had come home for dinner—which had been odd because he distinctly remembered Galahad saying that he and Mariette were doing something this evening. So he’d casually asked if everything was all right with her, and then Galahad had gone into a weird ramble.

“Anyway, I have no idea how she is. Except that she had to cancel on me tonight and somehow I ended up agreeing to going over to her place tomorrow,” Galahad muttered, banging around in the fridge. He briefly ducked out to drop a package of steak and something in a plastic bag—vegetables?—on the counter, then dove back in. From the sound of things, he was getting himself a beer. “Hey, what’s up? Were you inviting Jess over or something?”

At least coughing ejected the eraser from Jack’s mouth, even if it did seem to make his cheeks burn even more. “Oh, no. I was just, ah, curious. For no particular reason. Just randomly.”

“Breathe, Jack. Did you want to have her over? Don’t you guys have a midterm coming up?” Galahad started to do something on the counter, then paused with a big knife in the air. He cocked his head to the side, thinking, and then turned around. “I mean, I can always go over and see if Gawain needs me to keep him from having another melt-down.”

“Isn’t today Tristan’s day off? I thought you said something about them catching a movie tonight?” Actually, it’d been more like a grumpy pre-coffee Galahad muttering about why the hell Tristan would want to see a crime thriller when all he’d do would be criticizing the accuracy, but Jack figured perfect recollection wasn’t a good thing in this case.

“Oh. Right. Damn.” Shaking his head, Galahad turned back around. The knife slid through something and thunked once on the cutting board. “Well, I could—”

Jack had another short coughing fit. “No, really, it’s all right. I’m perfectly fine.”

Chopping noises. An onion, judging from the smell.

“She’s got practice,” Galahad said in a knowing tone.

After another moment, Jack took the textbook off his lap and wandered into the kitchen area. Staring at those damn musculature diagrams wasn’t going to do anything for him, and he was getting hungry so he should be helping. “Yes, she has practice. And also I can’t just invite her over.”

“Why not? Here, get the salt and pepper…oh, and garlic powder.” Galahad shoved all the chopped vegetables to the side and started unwrapping the steaks.

“Because I barely know her!” Jack knew what the other man’s reply was going to be almost before he saw the expression on Galahad’s face. They hadn’t been rooming together for very long, but somehow they’d already gotten a couple stock arguments and this was one of them. It was nice that Galahad cared, but…well, couldn’t he have chosen teasing about something else for bonding? “All right, I know tons _about_ her, but I’ve only talked to her for less than two months. I don’t want to scare her, God help me—and I think I already have.”

After Jack got the spices together, Galahad mixed up a rub in a bowl and then began patting it onto the steaks. He was a surprisingly good cook, though his tastes ran a little towards the spicy side compared to Jack. “Well, yeah, if you’re gonna rattle off every single move of one game she played a year ago _including_ when she took water breaks, I’d be fucking scared, too.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Jack muttered. He’d already spent two weeks cringing over that moment.

“No problem.” Galahad tossed the steaks onto the frying pan, where they sizzled so loudly that Jack jumped. Snickering a little, Galahad pushed by Jack and rinsed off his hands before grabbing his beer from the counter. “The offer to sneak you into the—”

Jack rolled his eyes and poked around for some cups. The last time they’d used the dishwasher, somebody had popped in a plastic bowl that apparently wasn’t dishwasher-safe and it’d gone gooey all over the rack. Since that actually doubled as extra storage space, they’d ended up having to temporarily shove glasses and plates into a whole bunch of random places. “I think that would frighten her quite a bit. And possibly get a restraining order slapped on me.”

“Well, okay, if you’re that worried.” According to Galahad’s tone, Jack was overreacting again. “I’m just putting the offer on the table. Just would hate to see you miss out on a hook-up just because you didn’t take a chance.”

“I’ll take chances! I’ll take them when I think it’s appropriate, and I don’t think there’s any need to rush now. If I want to talk to Jess, I don’t have to go through super-spy hijinks to get to her,” Jack snapped. Sometimes Galahad’s I’m-the-grad-student attitude did get to him, though it was mostly true.

The other man paused, then shrugged and went back to what he was doing: searching for a spatula to flip the steaks, possibly. His voice flattened out a bit with his reply. “Hey, okay. I was just offering. Get me those onions, would you?”

After another moment, Jack got them and brought them over. He started to hand the plate to Galahad, but the other man just reached back and swept all the vegetables off with a quick, slightly harsh motion. He knocked some of them on the floor and cursed under his breath, trying to step away, lean down and turn steaks at the same time. Jack watched, feeling confused and rather uncomfortable, before belatedly jumping in and picking up the spilled vegetables. “Sorry.”

“No, I—never mind.” Galahad added something else that Jack didn’t catch. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds, then opened them and shook his head. “How do you take your meat? I forgot, sorry.”

“Um…medium, I guess. I like pink, but not real bloody,” Jack said. He wasn’t quite sure what had just happened, but he felt it pass right then, a little like the car settling down after hitting a large pothole. “Oh! Um…listen, I should probably let you know: I have to fly home for Thanksgiving. The family insists.”

An odd kind of look went over Galahad’s face, which he briefly scrunched like he was grimacing, but without any of the annoyance. “‘Have to’? ‘Insists’?”

“I don’t think the break’s long enough to be worth the trip home. I mean, we don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving in Ireland! It’s just an excuse to have me home to—well, you don’t want to hear about that.” Jack poured himself some orange juice. Some leftover cheese—was that the cheddar?—caught his eye and he grabbed that for nibbling while the steaks finished cooking.

Galahad snorted like something was trying to stuff it back into his nose. “I’m totally clueless about that, man. I wouldn’t know whether I wanted to hear about it or not—my parents ditched me before I ever had that problem.”

The cheese turned out to be a wonderful idea, since it occupied Jack’s mouth while he tried to figure out how to react to that. Of course his first reaction was to express his sympathies, but somehow he had a feeling that that wouldn’t work like he’d want it to. Possibly how Galahad claimed his father had ditched him, whereas Gawain had told Jack that Galahad’s father had died when Galahad was barely more than a baby.

“Well, it’s just that I went to college over here for a reason. I mean, my parents have part-time residency here, but honestly, they’d rather I have went to Trinity in Dublin or something like that,” Jack finally muttered.

“Wanted a new scene?” Galahad asked.

Jack nearly choked on the cheese by snorting while chewing. “Wanted to…I love my family, but they’re blueblooded pricks most of the time. I got tired of feeling like I had to constantly apologize for them.”

“Surprised they let you room with me, then. Sounds like they’d absolutely _hate_ me.” Galahad flicked off the burners and turned around to get the plate. He expertly flipped both steaks out of their nest of semi-wilted veggies and onto it, then went back to frying.

“They probably would. No offense. But I don’t—I think you’re really cool. Um. I sound like a girl, sorry. I know you already have one. Um.” Cheese. Cheese. Damn it, Jack was running out of bits to shove in his mouth.

At least Galahad still had his back to him. “Thanks, Jack. Don’t know if that was what you wanted when you signed up—”

“Oh, hell, I was just looking for location. I had no idea what you were like,” Jack said, not really thinking about it.

After a second, Galahad’s shoulders relaxed and he let out a short, casual laugh. “Then it’s cool. Hey, eat up already. Fucking steaks have to be congealing by now.”

“Crap, sorry, sorry,” Jack muttered, grabbing for the silverware drawer.

* * *

Mariette popped her head around the corner about an hour from lunch break, expression dead serious and hair kind of a mess, which was a warning sign. “Galahad. We need to talk.”

“Well…I’m coming over for dinner later,” Galahad slowly said.

“Yes. Yes, you are.” And she was distracted by something. “But I need to talk to you before that.”

He almost asked her if it had anything to do with the big stick that’d been wedged up her ass for the past couple of days, but right by the coffeemaker, in hearing distance of something like fifteen offices, was a pretty shitty place to have a fight. So Galahad said okay, and Mariette said something about coming back a half-hour before dinner, and then they both went back to whatever they were doing. In Galahad’s case, that was crunching data.

“Hey,” somebody said about an hour later.

“What,” Galahad snapped.

After a moment, Gawain whistled beneath his breath and pretended to back away from the door. “You’re nasty today.”

“No, I just thought you were—never mind. What’s up?” Galahad finished up with another ream of data and took a second to switch his feet from the floor to dangling over the couch-arm. His calves were beginning to twinge on him, and it’d be his back next. He really wished he could do more of this shit on the computer, but that wasn’t going to happen till he figured out the bug in his program. And in the meantime, he still had to come up with something for his progress reports. “Why are you so happy?”

“Hmm? Am I usually depressed?” Gawain asked. He wandered over to the bookcase on the wall and started poking around in the binders for the old exams.

Well, no, he wasn’t, but it hadn’t been that long ago that he and Tristan had had that blow-up, and Galahad knew they hadn’t completely fixed the problem that had caused it. Tristan worked shorter days, but he’d gotten that in exchange for being on-call more often and he had to run out pretty often. At least judging from how many times Galahad got a call from Gawain asking if he wanted to hang out.

Too fucking bad Gawain hadn’t done that the other night. Galahad still felt a little bad for ripping on Jack like that, even if the other man had taken it all okay. For that matter, he still didn’t even know really _why_ he’d done that and that annoyed the hell out of him on top of everything else.

“Hey, how’s Mariette?” After a moment, Gawain stopped messing with the binders and turned around. “Wrong thing to say?”

“Only if you’re expecting me to have a short answer,” Galahad muttered. He shuffled through the papers with the next set of data outputs, then sighed and started over once he realized he wasn’t actually reading them. “She’s fine, I guess. Why don’t you ask her?”

Gawain snorted. Binders thumped around. “Okay, now I know what’s wrong.”

“Really? Wanna share?” Maybe Tristan had turned into some sickeningly gooey freak after their fight and he and Gawain were making with the nauseating couple-stuff, like feeding rats to Iseult together. Sometimes Gawain could have a weird weakness for that kind of thing.

It sounded like Gawain almost said something, but he stopped himself. After some more rummaging around, he found whatever he needed and started to walk back to the door. He shot Galahad an exasperated look along the way, to which Galahad raised his eyebrows and made with the ‘what?’ hand-gestures. So Gawain stopped—he actually put his hand on his hip like he was channeling Grandma Yvie or something.

“Stop being an asshole, would you? If you need help, I’ll be happy to give it, but right now I don’t feel like fighting with you. And it’s not going to make you feel any better,” he said.

“Thanks.” Galahad glanced down at the papers he was holding, but they’d flopped over on him. He smacked them against his legs to try and straighten them out, but they just flopped over again. And then he nearly threw them against the wall, but that was fucking over-dramatic and instead he just kicked out his legs so his head fell back against the other sofa-arm. “Thanks a lot. Look, I don’t know how Mariette is, okay? I really don’t, so you might as well ask her. Hell, maybe you’ll have better luck with it—God knows she seems to like you more than me most of the time.”

Gawain let out an incredulous laugh. “Uh, Galahad, she’s dating you.”

“Not that I can fucking tell right now,” Galahad muttered without really thinking. He grimaced and slapped the papers a few more times till they finally bent the right way. Then he tried to go back to analyzing, but he couldn’t focus. “Goddamn it—you know, it’s probably her period or something. She’s just been all weird. One minute she’s all over me and the next she’s acting like I pissed her off.”

“Have you…like, asked her what’s wrong?”

“Yeah, like that ever does any good. Girls always say they want you to be honest and be involved, but that’s such a load of bullshit. All that got me was her biting my head off about implying that she was emotionally unstable.” Plus him going home early instead of spending the night like he’d planned, and then getting woken up by a weird apologetic call from her way early in the morning, but Gawain probably didn’t need all the details. God knew Galahad thought he did okay just knowing mostly general stuff about Gawain and Tristan.

Gawain tucked his stuff beneath his arm and turned around to completely face Galahad. He frowned and scratched at his head. “Well, when are you going to see her again?”

“Toni—no, actually, she went and changed that on me. I’m gonna see her in a couple hours, and then we’re having dinner. I’m kind of tempted to just blow her off at the last minute and see how she feels,” Galahad said. He heard Gawain’s mouth open and rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not actually _going_ to. God, she’d yell her head off for months. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be tempted. And honestly, I think I’m entitled to be.”

“You can have a funny idea of what that word means sometimes. But look, just ask her again. Mariette’s as—well, as stubborn as you are, so just keep asking. If it pisses her off into yelling at you, at least you’ll find out what’s the matter,” Gawain replied. His tone was all reasonable and calm, as if he hadn’t just proposed that Galahad make his life a misery for literal weeks.

Galahad stared at the ceiling for a couple seconds. “Man, why do you hate me all of a sudden?”

“Okay, now you’re just exaggerating to get some pity.” Gawain waited a beat before he added the rest. “If you need a place to hide afterward, you can come over tonight and bitch all you want to me about how crappily my idea worked. Tristan and I didn’t have anything planned.”

“Thanks,” Galahad snorted again.

After a moment, Gawain made a ‘whatever’ noise and got moving again. He opened the door and got halfway through it, then paused for some reason. Probably because he wanted to show off how well he knew Galahad, and that could get really annoying sometimes.

“You have any decent beer? ‘cause I’m not doing that weird-ass European stuff Tristan gets.” On the other hand, it was a bad idea not to have a safe-house around. Even if it came with a mother-hen and his borderline-psycho boyfriend.

“God, it’s not going to kill—okay, okay, I’ll stop by the corner store and grab a six-pack on the way home,” Gawain said. He sounded like a harassed parent caving in to a bawling brat by the candy rack of the supermarket check-out aisle. “Anything else?”

Galahad debated almost too long about whether to ask and had to rush it a little. “Hey, so you and Tristan…okay again? ‘cause no offense, but if I’m gonna be walking into my own shitstorm, I don’t want to be going from it to…yeah, you know.”

He looked up when he didn’t get an answer right away from Gawain. The other man had gone…not quite blank, but he definitely was closing down while he did figure out what expression to pull up. The place just behind Galahad’s breastbone tightened up a little; he wondered if that’d been too lousy a way to ask about that.

In the end, Gawain apparently settled for mildly frustrated mixed in with a little appreciation. “Well, it’s still kind of crappy, but we’re talking about it, anyway. He…” Gawain grinned, half-thankful and half-disgusted “…if he’s not home for lunch or dinner, he usually calls for a check-in. It’s kind of bad because I can hear people talking about skull wounds and bullet angles in the background, but at least I get to talk to him?”

“Ew. And you still watch those forensic lab shows,” Galahad said.

“Well, they make it look _cool_. I can kind of get why he likes the work so much when I see those.” Gawain shrugged and stared off, clearly getting all smushy inside.

Galahad went back to his data while he could. “Great to hear. Not so—”

“You can always close your eyes if you don’t want to watch,” Gawain shot back, walking out. “Call when you come, okay? The doorbell’s not working right.”

“Okay.”

* * *

It took five minutes for Galahad to get his stuff together. Ten minutes for them to walk from the GSI room to where Mariette was parked, and then they were about three minutes into driving to her place when she finally decided to give him a clue. She’d been talking before that—a little too fast and a little too high-pitched—but it was all about nonsense stuff. And then: “My parents are in town.”

Damn good thing he wasn’t driving. “What?”

“My parents are in town.” Mariette started to slow down for no good reason, considering they were halfway between lights and this street was moving along at a pretty decent rate, and then abruptly hit the accelerator when the guy behind them honked. She nearly slammed them into the bumper in front of them.

Then again, maybe he should have driven. He would’ve swerved too, but just once, and right now Mariette had a white-knuckled grip on the wheel and was getting that wild stare that meant she was about to flip out. “Oh…kay. Since when?”

“They’ll be at dinner,” Mariette said. The car skidded a little in stopping at the next light. She started to wring the wheel with her hands so the leather covering creaked. “I had to tell them about you. You left your shirt over the last time you came.”

For a couple moments, Galahad debated whether grab for the wheel or for the doorhandle. Then he stabbed the heels of his feet into the floor and went for the gear-shift instead, getting there before Mariette did. “Pull over.”

“We’re already late!” Slip into French.

“I don’t give a fuck. It’s New York City—it only takes ten minutes in downtown for people to figure out what the traffic is like here,” Galahad muttered, practicing his French expletives. “Pull the fuck over before I do something stupid and jump out. We need to talk.”

Mariette took a left instead of a right and then pulled into the parking lot of a tiny local gym. She jerked forward, using her whole body weight to move the gear-shift, and then slowly leaned back while taking a long, shaky breath. Galahad looked at her, then turned to stare numbly out through the windshield.

“Told you,” she finally said beneath her breath.

“Well, if you fucking want to talk, we can fucking talk. But this damn well isn’t it—God, couldn’t you give me more advance warning? I…I mean…” He looked down at his jeans and buttondown shirt, which were fine but not what he’d…well, hell, he wasn’t sure why he cared. It wasn’t like he dressed up for meetings with Arthur or Kitty or other faculty members, and this was just a meal at home, not out at some fancy restaurant. “Jesus Christ, Mariette, you said they’d have problems with me before they even met me! What are you trying to do, make sure they hate me? Is this your way of saying we should break up?”

“No! No, I’m not, I’m just really worried and I was surprised and couldn’t think, and now you’re making it all worse by yelling at me!” Mariette finished with throwing her hands up in the air so hard that she hit them against the ceiling. The loud thud they made freaked her out or something because she yelped and scrunched down in the seat, staring up at the ceiling.

Galahad opened his mouth to snap at her, realized he basically had the same expression on his face, and instead tried to breathe. In the end, he had to do it through his mouth because he couldn’t relax enough to do it through his nose. “Okay. Okay. Never the fuck mind. What did you tell them about me? The truth, or did you like, lie, or what? At least don’t make me walk in blind.”

“I told them your name and that you were a grad student with Arthur, and how old you were. Then I told them I had to go to work,” Mariette said, mushing the words in her rush to get them out. She slid her arms to lie over each other on top of the wheel and then put her head down on them, looking absolutely miserable.

Well, Galahad could kind of understand, but he still was more…disbelieving? pissed off? offended?...than sympathetic. “Wait, _when_ did you tell them? When did they come?”

“I picked them up last night from the airport. My mother found your stuff this morning during breakfast.” It sounded like something was getting stuck in Mariette’s throat with every other word. She rubbed at her nose, then pinched it and blew hard to clear her sinuses.

Just…Jesus Christ. Okay, she had parent-issues and she had a hell of a lot of problems dealing with them—actually, she didn’t even deal with them; she just shoved them under the carpet—when her parents were across the Atlantic. But this was still just fucking nuts. Galahad looked at the dashboard and for a moment, he honestly wondered who the hell was next to him, because Mariette normally had one massive backbone for it to just have vanished like this.

“Please tell me it was a surprise visit,” Galahad finally said.

Mariette sniffled once. She looked angry at herself for letting it out. “No. The Thanksgiving Break is bad for them, and so is most of the winter vacation, so they told me they were coming now about a week and a half ago. I couldn’t say no. I—I just didn’t want to think about it. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Galahad scuffed his foot at the floor, his temper eating at him. But Mariette looked like she was feeling so lousy, her voice flat and her face set like one crack would shatter it, that he just knew he’d feel like crap for calling her on it. “Well, okay, so what?”

“So you come to dinner. They insist on meeting you.” After a long breath, Mariette pushed herself off the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition and put the car in drive. “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever,” Galahad muttered. He saw her flinch out of the corner of his eye, but he couldn’t feel all that guilty about that. He was fucking angry, and he had the fucking right.

* * *

Mariette was oddly quiet the rest of the way. She scrunched her shoulders inward, even when she was unlocking the front door, and then called softly into the apartment before she let Galahad come in.

To be dead honest, Galahad was mentally kicking himself for not jumping out of the car and running while he could. He even had an offer from Gawain for where to go, and then hey, Mariette wouldn’t even be in trouble with her parents since she could just blame him. And then after her parents went back to France, they could have make-up sex.

Yeah, nerves were a problem. Galahad edged his way inside, pushing at his hair and listening for movement. He nearly jumped when somebody walked into the hall from the direction of the bedroom. “Oh! Oh…uh, salut. Je m’appelle—”

“Bonjour.” The man—Mariette’s father—stiffly nodded. He was medium height, dressed precisely in the kind of quality suit Arthur favored…though Arthur never made them look like they possibly were stiffened by sheets of metal stitched into them. He managed to peer through his tiny spectacle lenses as if he were being forced to examine something he knew was crappy. And they were definitely spectacles, and not glasses.

He put out his hand, which Galahad took and shook, but then the guy pulled his hand away with a faint grimace. Too hard of a shake? Too tight of a grip? What?

“Sylvain Carnot. You speak French, but you’re American.” He spoke English, but it wasn’t that clear he wasn’t a robot. “I understand you are engaged in a relationship with my daughter.”

Mariette strayed off to the side, just within Galahad’s field of vision. She had her arms crossed over her chest and was looking mostly at her feet.

“Sylvain.” Mariette’s mother came down the hall from the direction of the kitchen. She might’ve still been a pretty good-looking woman, even with the large grey streaks in her hair, if she hadn’t had such a sour expression on her face. But that was pointed at her husband, so Galahad tentatively thought he might like her.

Mariette’s dad looked sheepish and muttered something apologetic, then gestured between his wife and Galahad. “Simone, this is…you haven’t introduced yourself yet, I believe.”

“Please, be forthright and honest. We would like to get to know the man who’s involved with our daughter,” Simone said, turning the ice onto Galahad.

He pressed his tongue to the backs of his teeth, trying really hard to swallow that one, he _had_ been trying to introduce himself when Sylvain had interrupted, and two, he’d like to be presumed innocent till proven guilty, thank you very fucking much. After a moment, he managed to shake Simone’s hand without saying anything stupid. Or anything at all past a “I’m Galahad, nice to meet you.”

Total fucking lie. And Mariette was totally not any help at all, what with the way she was trying to fade into the wall. She could at least try to stand next to Galahad, or…or something. Jesus.

“Shall we sit down to dinner?” Sylvain asked Simone.

“I think so. It’s about all ready—I found everything all right, Mariette,” Simone replied. The second part of it was just barely for Mariette and Galahad’s benefit. “Is it all right if we speak in French, or would you prefer English?”

Galahad’s French was good enough to follow a movie and to talk with Mariette, but it clearly wasn’t going to be up to the level of her parents. He was already feeling like a fucking hick and the last thing he needed was to give them more shit to nail to his coffin. On the other hand, asking for English was probably going to get him labeled as ‘not our type’ just as quickly.

Home-turf advantage, he finally decided. “I’m still working on my French, so I’d appreciate it if we could all speak English, sir. Ma’am.”

“Well, all right,” Sylvain said. He was so very clearly being nice to the underdeveloped youth, and holy fucking God but _fuck_ him.

This was going to be so painful.

* * *

The silence streak continued from Mariette. The food wasn’t her cooking, not that Galahad had a chance for more than a taste. He was too busy trying to handle the conversation with her parents, which mostly went along the lines of:

Parent: You’re from Los Angeles?

Galahad: Yeah, originally.

Parent: Is it true that some schools there use metal detectors?

Galahad: Yeah. They never bothered me that much, though they made it hard to run to class if you were late. But at least you had a reason to try and be early, I guess.

Parent: *telling pause* Your school actually used them?

Galahad: Um, yeah. Um…the potatoes are really good, Madame Carnot.

Sylvain: Actually, I made those. Simone and I are strong believers that adults should not be limited by gender-specific stereotyping. We brought up Mariette with the intention that she would never feel as if her femininity blocked her from doing anything. It’s very important to us and to her future.

Galahad: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. That’s so true.

Parent: *inclines head* Good.

Though after a horrific, endless forty minutes, who ended up taking Galahad aside in the kitchen? Mariette’s fucking father.

By then Galahad was feeling every inch of his ghetto-ass background and hating it, because it wasn’t like he’d asked to be born into his situation and then fuck it, he’d done the best he could with what he had so he didn’t need to apologize. Or to feel shitty about himself. He didn’t need to defend himself at all, but that didn’t make him feel okay about keeping _his_ fucking head down and mumbling and basically being a doormat. Though hey, at least he’d been talking. Mariette might as well have been a fucking pillar of salt.

“Can you pass the soap?” Galahad barely managed to ask. He knocked up the faucet handle with his arm while shoving the plug into the drain so the sink would fill up.

“Galahad, I think you are a very smart and resourceful young man. You’ve obviously overcome many obstacles to be where you are today. But I am a father, and so I have to put the welfare of my child first,” Sylvain said. Instead of passing the soap. “Mariette will have finished her degree in two years at the very latest, and then she will have to consider her career. She’s young, but that does not mean that she cannot ignore the effects of the connections she makes—”

The water coming out of the faucet swirled up against the sides of the sink before dropping to pool with the rest. Nice for it. _Fuck_ it. “Look, Mr—Monsieur—whatever. I grew up in a shit part of L. A. I never knew who the fuck my dad was and my mom liked me so much she left me when I was a kid, and I got raised by the grandmother of my best friend. I ended up part of a gang for a while, and yeah, that meant guns and knives. But I fucking hauled my ass through college and into grad school.”

“I’m only saying—”

Galahad turned around, and God, it pissed him off even more that Mariette’s dad jumped back like Galahad was going to attack him. “You had your fucking say all through dinner! I’m not good enough! I’m a fucking American! I have a lousy background! I’m gonna screw up Mariette’s life—except I fucking well am not.”

After that initial step, the other man stopped and held his ground. He narrowed his eyes behind his stupid little glasses and shoved his chin forward. “I can believe that you don’t harbor the intent, but how do I know—”

“Well, fuck, you wouldn’t know from your daughter, who you care so much about but who’s so damn terrified of you that she won’t even speak up for me. That she won’t speak, period, and let me just say right now that if that’s from her upbringing, then you’re a fucking lousy parent. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about there,” Galahad snarled. He took a step back himself and put one hand on the counter, gripping the edge to try and stop the trembling that had started going through his body. But he was so _pissed off_ right now. “Way to raise a progressive, independent young woman, you selfish fuck. What if she is happy with me right now? What if the fact that I love her, and I do and believe that, damn it, means that I won’t hurt her?”

Open-mouthed shock was a better look for Sylvain. And for Simone, who’d hurried up behind them to stand in the doorway to the dining room. Which meant Galahad’s voice was carrying far enough for Mariette to hear, and he wasn’t really sparing her any but that was fine. She needed to hear this.

“But you know, never the fuck mind about all that. You know—you know, I am so goddamn _mad_ right now at Mariette, with how she didn’t tell you about me in the first place because deep down, I guess she thinks I’m crap too, and then how she just left me out to dry with you two during dinner. I am so—but she does it because she cares how you think about her. Because you’re her parents.” Galahad wrenched his hand off the counter. The force it took to do that rocked him back a few steps before he got his balance back. He put his hands up, forgot what he meant to do with them and just raked them through his hair. The pain of strands getting pulled out seemed to draw a little bit of his rage with it, since his voice wasn’t shaking quite so much when he spoke again. “She still depends on you. And as much as I love her? I can’t take care of her all by my—if you two drop her cold, I can’t catch her. So you know, fine. I hated my fucking mother but you’d better bet I hated having to live on the streets after she left more, and I’m not doing that to Mariette. I’m not gonna be a goddamn romantic about it.”

That…pretty much covered everything he had to say. It took a couple moments for that message to get through from Galahad’s brain to the rest of him, but as soon as everything was clear, he went ahead and pushed past Sylvain. Walked by Simone, didn’t look for Mariette because she probably was just hiding again, and then kept on going through the front door.

* * *

The couch cushion to Galahad’s left dipped. It wasn’t Tristan, because Galahad could still hear him messing around with some white rabbits. Which were a new and very weird addition to the apartment, but come to think of it, they were probably just hawk food or whatever. Mystery solved.

“I let you work through three beers,” Gawain said. “Come on. What happened? What’d she say?”

Oh, right—he still thought all Galahad had done was ask Mariette what was wrong. “Well, she didn’t say a damn thing. I think I basically dumped her.”

“ _What_?”

“It’s for her own good. She doesn’t need the complications and now she doesn’t have to worry about her parents’ reaction,” Galahad mumbled, swigging more beer. Gawain had gotten the decent stuff, which was about the only thing that had gone Galahad’s way all day. “Yeah, that doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, turns out her parents flew in and she didn’t tell me we were all having dinner together till we were practically at her place.”

Back in the kitchen, the rabbits suddenly went nuts and thumped around like crazy. That was probably Tristan cocking one ear to listen.

“Oh. Ooooooh, man. I guess it went pretty badly, huh,” Gawain said.

“Badly? They did just about everything but actually call me a jumped-up hoodlum who was gonna turn Mariette into a crackwhore. And—” Galahad started to laugh, all shaky again, and had to stop himself by pouring beer into his mouth and choking on it “—and you know what little miss Woman-Power did? Fucking _nothing_. She just sat there and didn’t say anything while her parents took me apart, and didn’t say anything when her dad tried to tell me to stay away from her, and—and whatever. I lost my fucking temper and yelled at him and you’re just gonna say I was being a brat.”

Gawain leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees and stared at the TV for a moment. “Hey, I don’t even know what you said to him. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“Well, I called him a crappy parent. That better have hurt, since he took himself so damn seriously. Jesus Christ…” This probably was going to be the last beer, Galahad thought. He played aimlessly with the bottle’s neck, finding it almost funny that apparently, he could feel so shitty that he didn’t even want to get drunk. “But fuck, he’s her dad. What am I supposed to do, make her choose? For all I know they’d cut her off for good.”

“She’s a legal adult and anyway, Arthur would feel an obligation to help her,” Tristan said from the kitchen.

Galahad lifted one arm over his head and gave the other man the finger, then flopped back down. “Yeah, sure, like that’s going to really make up for it.”

“Her mom and dad sound like shitty people, though,” Gawain protested.

They probably were all right to their students and their colleagues, and anyone else they thought was good enough. Mentally flicking another finger in their direction, Galahad drained the rest of his beer and then leaned forward to line up the bottle with the other empty ones. “They’re still her parents.”

“Yeah, but…hey, where is this coming from anyway? I mean, with you and me…” Gawain never liked to directly mention Galahad’s mom, which was nice of him but not really that necessary, since it was him.

Galahad stayed leaning forward, letting his hands dangle between his knees. A sharp, quick stab of pain went through his head and he put it down to rest on one forearm, but oddly enough, no migraine swelled up. One-time thing, apparently. “I still miss Mom,” he muttered. He heard Gawain make a weird cut-off noise and smiled sourly to the floor. “Yeah, I still hate her neglectful ass, but I miss her. Like…I miss having a mom. And a dad. Not that Grandma Yvie wasn’t great, but she was still your grandma, not mine. It makes no fucking sense, but there it is. So I can’t blame Mariette for wanting to stay on good terms with her parents, even if I think it’s shit.”

“You really aren’t making sense. Is the beer getting to you already?” A long weight dropped over Galahad’s shoulders. After a moment, Gawain let his forearm drop so it curled around the side of Galahad’s neck.

“No.” Closing his eyes, Galahad just…leaned against the other man. He hadn’t done this in years…since before he was a teenager, maybe, but Gawain’s shoulder hadn’t changed much. It still was bony and no matter how he rested his head, the point of it poked him in the temple.

Gawain gave him a couple squeezes, moving from Galahad’s shoulder to his bicep and then back up. “Hey…”

“I’m not going to cry on you.” No, Galahad’s eyes were bone-dry, and the tight rage in his throat was gone, too. “I just…I’m kind of tired. And I don’t want to go home. I mean, I’d probably end up freaking out Jack by accident. Already did that once this week.”

“No problem. You can crash here anytime, you know,” Gawain said. He started patting Galahad’s shoulder again. If it made him feel more comfortable to do that, then he could rock himself out on that.

* * *

“I don’t think I really got all of that, but I hope I don’t see Mariette for a while because I’m pretty angry at her right now.” Gawain gave the blanket another good shake before draping it over Galahad and the couch, which he and Tristan had pulled out into the full futon. He shook his head. “I don’t—didn’t he seem more mad at her parents than at her?”

Tristan shrugged. “Yes, but I can understand his reasoning.”

“Was he actually reasoning?” Gawain asked, looking confusedly at him.

It took a moment to put a response together. “Even a…even a bad parent is still a parent. Any other guardian isn’t really the same thing—Arthur was never my mother, or a…stand-in for my father. He’s different. And when you remember having a parent, you think a lot about how they might have changed. You can’t really overwrite them.”

“I thought…you, uh, loved your mom. Sorry if that came out wrong, which I think it did.” After stuffing a pillow beneath Galahad’s head, Gawain stepped back to stand beside Tristan. He glanced over Galahad, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“I did love her. But—” Tristan swallowed “—just because I don’t mind learning about how to manipulate identities and do covert surveillance doesn’t mean I think it was…right for her to bring me up so I had to do that. Just in case things from her life came after me.”

Gawain took his hands out of his pockets. “Oh. I…kind of get that.” He gave his palms a brief, wry half-smile. “Jesus, I’m the only one who had anything like a normal parent-figure the whole time, aren’t I? In this room.”

“It’s not something to feel guilty about. Not something to brag about, either.” Hopefully Gawain understood Tristan wasn’t thinking of him with that second part.

A warm hand slipped around Tristan’s. After a moment, Gawain used his hold to pull them together. He sighed and pressed his forehead against Tristan’s, then pushed his head onto Tristan’s shoulder. Tristan wrapped his arm around the other man’s back.

“Damn. Well, best thing to do now is let him sleep, I guess,” Gawain said into Tristan’s neck. “I don’t know if he’ll be okay.”

Tristan tightened his grip on Gawain. He brushed a kiss against the other man’s temple, then rested his cheek against the top of Gawain’s head. It was as much as he knew how to do, and at least it seemed to make Gawain a little less tense, which should work in Galahad’s favor later.

* * *

Life had to be taken care of. Galahad went back to his place the next day, still tired and irritated as hell from fending off Gawain in super-mother mode, and snapped at Jack for most of Sunday. Monday morning he apologized, then went to work and grimly amused himself with asking his discussion section diabolically hard questions. It cheered him up till he got back to the grad student room and saw who was waiting for him. Mariette’s fucking mother.

“We thought that you might have a less hostile reaction to me,” she said, all grave with her hands folded over her purse.

“Who would ‘we’ be?” Well, since he and Mariette weren’t dating now, he could be as rude to her parents as he wanted.

Simone looked pained. “My husband and I. We…have you spoken to Mariette yet?”

“No.” Galahad had turned off his cell-phone while storming out of her apartment, and honestly, he hadn’t turned it on since. That was probably going to come back to bite him in the ass, but whatever.

“Oh. Well, may I speak to you?” Simone asked.

In ten minutes, Galahad’s computer lab time started and he really needed all of it if he wanted to stay on schedule. “Aren’t we already doing that?”

“Well, yes, I suppose. But I want to speak to you about our daughter. Mariette—we love her very much, and she is our only child, so I think sometimes we worry much more than most people do about what is best for her. But I’ve spoken to Art—to Professor Pen—”

“Great. You got a reference for me from my advisor. God, if I’d known, I just would’ve brought a copy of my résumé along to dinner,” Galahad sarcastically said.

Simone’s whole face did this weird twitch- _stone_ thing that just…it just kind of made Galahad want to shut up, and not in a mad or dismissive kind of way. “I’m here partly because I do believe that you genuinely care for my daughter. Please don’t be flippant.”

Galahad snorted and turned away to look down the hall. Then he sighed and turned back. “Okay, what? Though I can’t promise I won’t walk off if you start talking down to me again.”

“I wanted to apologize, both for me and for my husband, for any offense we may have given you the other day. We’ve talked at length with Mariette and she’s made it clear that she…that you make her happy. We want her to be happy,” Simone told him. She paused to draw in a deep breath; this obviously wasn’t all that easy for her to accept. “We want her to be able to govern her own life as she pleases, and if you’re her choice, then that is what you are.”

Funny how nobody seemed to be around today. Usually the hallway was bustling with people who loved to interrupt conversations and eavesdrop and all that, but right now Galahad and Simone might as well have been standing in an abandoned building.

“Damning with faint praise, huh. Well…thanks. It’s good to know that you won’t be riding Mariette’s back about me,” Galahad said. He tried to push his hand in his pocket, but the pocket fabric was all smushed up near the top or something so he had to really work to get his fingers into it.

Simone’s lips pressed tightly together. She looked like she was about to tell him off, but at the last moment apparently changed her mind. “I won’t lie. You are not who we had in mind for Mariette. But it’s her mind, her life, and we have to respect—no, the better word is that we have to trust in her. We’re being sincere, Galahad.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” He could give her that much. Even if he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say anything else now. “Hey…how come your English is so much better than—”

“Our English is perfect for use in an academic setting. But we prefer French, and we always expected that Mariette would stay in France,” Simone answered. A rueful look passed over her face. She briefly looked down, then lifted her head again just as somebody walked down a nearby hall.

Nobody interrupted, but obviously it wouldn’t be too long before that happened. Galahad started to open his mouth to say so, but Simone beat him to it.

“My point is that we will—we will _try_ , very hard, to let Mariette judge you, and then our judgment of you will be based on that. Our plane back to France takes off this afternoon—I need to leave in a few minutes to hail the taxi.” Simone hesitated, then put out her hand. “I know it was not a pleasant meeting, but I did want to meet you, and I do…I do wish you good luck.”

After a moment, Galahad took her hand and shook it two or three times, which seemed to be fine with her, too. “The same to you and Mr. Carnot. I guess I can accept all of that.”

“Thank you.” They stared at each other for another ultra-awkward moment before Simone turned on one heel. She paused again, then finally started to slowly walk down the hall. She did look like Mariette right then.

Galahad went into the next room and flopped down on the couch. He didn’t feel any better or any happier for having had that conversation, but maybe things were…clearer. For all the good that did.

* * *

Gawain rubbed at his face some more. “Her mom apologizes like that, and then Mariette’s turning the whole place upside-down trying to contact you, and you still want to act like this?”

“Act like what? I mean all of this. I’m goddamn serious.” From where Galahad was standing, he could see Gawain’s discussion section craning necks and twisting in chairs trying to eavesdrop. Even Jack had left off bugging Jess to stare; when those two realized he’d caught them at it, they got identical flushes and ducked their heads together. Good luck to Jack, Galahad half-bitterly thought. “Look, yes, her parents apologized. But that’s not the whole thing, okay? I’m sorry if this ruins your idea that one heartfelt talk and making out in Arthur’s house always fixes everything.”

“That was never my idea,” Gawain snapped. For a moment, he looked so mad that Galahad thought he’d gone—but then the other man sighed and just smacked Galahad on the side of the head. “Fine, you’re in a cranky mood. I’ve got discussion to do here, but just—if it’s not the whole thing, hiding from Mariette sure as hell isn’t going to close things up.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Though it would’ve been nice, seriously, if Galahad could have avoided that conversation for a couple more days. Just two hours ago he’d lost his temper at a frozen computer and freaked the hell out of the other students in the room. Kitty had called him on the carpet for that.

Gawain frowned and leaned in a little, staring at Galahad’s eyes like he was checking for a concussion. Then he grimaced and gave Galahad a quick squeeze on the shoulder, but he was already turning away: some idiot undergrad had just pissed off Jess about last week’s match and there was a bit of a fight brewing. “Beer’s in my fridge, if you need it afterward.”

Galahad thanked him, or something like that. It wasn’t all that clear because just then Mariette had rounded the corner and well, they were going to do this now, weren’t they.

A last squeeze at Galahad’s arm, and then Gawain had disappeared into the room. For one crazy moment, Galahad thought about diving after him. Then he snorted at himself and stood where he was.

* * *

The hallway was too busy, so they ended up moving to a recess just in front of a large, somewhat randomly-placed window. Mariette looked like crap. She kept staring straight at Galahad, which made him shift around, as if somebody would shoot her if she looked anywhere else. “I think my mother was trying to find you,” she finally said.

“Yeah. She did. She apologized for her and your dad.” Galahad had the damnedest time not jumping every time somebody passed near them. Even just the jangling of somebody’s keys would almost set him off.

“That’s good…?” A smile almost broke onto Mariette’s face, but it ran off when she saw how Galahad wasn’t exactly thrilled. Her chin jerked downwards, but it was like her eyes were connected to Galahad’s with chains that yanked her head back up. “I talked to them afterward, and I told them they were being horrible and how much you meant to me.”

Galahad didn’t really feel anything at first. He shuffled his feet and pulled at a couple of strands that kept curling annoyingly into his eyes, but they wouldn’t stay out of the way. So he pulled harder and suddenly he was cursing and was shaking the loose strands from his fingers.

“I’m sorry. I’m—I know I didn’t do it right. I know it hurt you a lot to go through that, and that I was selfish and thinking about what was easiest for me. I…I’m sorry,” Mariette helplessly said, spreading her hands out. Her eyes were wide and pleading and…

…and Galahad could honestly say that his mind hadn’t changed. It hurt a hell of a lot and he wasn’t about to make _his_ life any easier, but he couldn’t…there were some things he couldn’t take. “Yeah.”

Mariette’s eyes widened a little more and she took a step forward; Galahad stumbled back about the same amount and she stopped. “Galahad?”

“Look, I…I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that it’s like that with your parents, that you’d even feel that bad in the first place. And I’m sorry that I couldn’t do anything about it beforehand.” Maybe he hadn’t exactly been expecting it to be that bad, but he had known she had a problem. “But—no, Mariette, look, I can’t…you just left me out there.”

“But I’m sorry!” she said, loud enough to attract attention from passersby.

“And I, um, accept that. I understand, you know. Kind of.” Galahad grimaced at his feet, then made himself look up again. She deserved that. “But I can’t get over it right now. I—that you’d do that to me.”

Her first response obviously was to get louder and pushier, but instead she bit down on her lip, and hard enough for it to turn white. She slowly stood back, thinking hard. “What are you saying? Are—do you—not love—me now?”

“If that were true, this would be a fucking piece of cake,” Galahad muttered. “No, I do. I do, but I can’t…just get over it that quick, because I—love you and because I thought you—never mind. I just need some space, Mariette. I need to not see you for a while.”

“I…this doesn’t make sense to me,” she said after a moment. She reached towards him and took a step forward, then started looking angry when he backed off again. “What? What else do I need to do?”

“Just—leave me alone. I don’t care if you don’t understand _why_. If you can get that it’s something I need to do to feel better so I’m not fucking pissed off at you anymore, then that should be enough. God knows I did the same for you.” That was a hard hit, and Galahad did it on purpose. Because he was still that mad at her, beneath everything else, and she needed to know. Even if she took it like he’d stabbed her in the gut, and he felt like he’d stabbed himself in the gut. “Okay?”

Mariette obviously didn’t agree on that. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, her expression shifting from pained to upset back to sad again. Her hands curled up into fists, then slowly uncurled and flexed their fingers. She kept looking at him, but when he didn’t give her the expression she was looking for or whatever, she snorted and looked away, incredulity pulling at the side of her mouth.

“Okay. Okay,” she abruptly said. She turned on her heel and stalked off.

Galahad didn’t even try to call after her. He took a step back once she was about ten yards away; his heel hit the wall and he jerked it back so hard that he ended up spinning around to face said wall. And then it just kind of made sense to kick the hell out of it a couple times.

Gave him a fucking bruised foot. He finally made himself stand back, breathing hard, and then turned to walk in the opposite direction as Mariette had gone.


	5. The Meaning of the Season

*Heathrow is terrible, but it always is. I told my parents to come pick me up a half-hour after my flight actually came in because I wanted some time to prep for it,* Guinevere said. She was nearly shouting over the phone, but was still barely audible due to the roaring background noise.

“Prep?” Arthur threw his scarf around his neck, then pinched his cell between his ear and shoulder while he tied off the ends. He took the phone in his hand again and picked up his briefcase.

Guinevere paused to snap at somebody to keep their whistles to themselves unless they wanted an international warrant slapped on them. *Oh, hair-spray, eye-shadow, blush…the first line of defense for a woman is her make-up, obviously. Anyway, just wanted to call to let you know I’m in all right, and make sure you and Lancelot were going to have some kind of proper dinner.*

“We’re both fairly good cooks,” Arthur dryly reminded her. He shut the door of his office, locked it, and then turned down the hall. The offices were already empty, most of the people having taken off either last night or early this morning for their Thanksgiving celebrations. Technically school had still been in session till about an hour ago, but it was impossible to enforce that rule. “We’ll be fine. I hope you will be as well. I’ll be home all the time, so feel free to call if it gets…ah, unbearable.”

*Even you can’t come up with a tactful way to talk about it,* Guinevere laughed. *Well, we’ll see. At least this time they can’t ask when I’m going to settle down with a man. Oh, d—I can see my mother. I’d better go.*

“Best of luck to you.” Shaking his head and smiling, Arthur thumbed off his cell. He stuck it in his pocket as he pushed through the building’s front doors and went on down the steps.

It’d chilled quite a bit from the morning and the air nipped at his cheeks and the edges of his nostrils, so he tucked his head down and pulled his scarf up a little, trying to trap some of his breath for the warmth against his face. The campus was oddly empty, with only a few stragglers moving between buildings, but even from where he was, Arthur could hear that the traffic was easily twice as bad as usual.

This year he planned on attending others’ Thanksgiving celebrations—Kitty had invited him to join her family for lunch, Vanora to stop in for dinner over the weekend—but he wasn’t hosting one himself. Tristan had mentioned doing something private with Gawain, presumably in response to the shakiness their relationship had developed, and when asked, Gawain had awkwardly implied that Galahad and Mariette would be uncomfortable spending time together in public. He didn’t say they were broken up, but apparently they still hadn’t gotten over the blow Mariette’s parents had dealt.

Arthur pressed his lips together, then shook his head. He had disagreed with Simone and Sylvain’s actions there, but it hadn’t gotten to the point where he would have felt his interference would have been justified. Though he almost wished it had; he saw just enough of Mariette to know she was desperately unhappy, and lately, Galahad had been working much too hard for his own good.

At any rate, that left Arthur and Lancelot alone for the long weekend. Of course, Lancelot had promptly suggested a whole list of activities, but it’d been predictably light on practical matters such as meals and sleep and the flexibility of Arthur’s aging back. But possibly they could get to a few of the ones less likely to end in a public indecency charge—

Faint music played somewhere, and after a moment, Arthur located its origin in his pocket. He sighed and took out his cell-phone; it sounded like Guinevere had gotten to it before she’d left and changed all his ring-tones again, claiming he needed a “touch of pop-culture” once in a while. “Hello?”

*Arthur? This is Edward Pellew. I’m sorry to be calling right now, but I needed to speak to you rather urgently. Can you get to a ground line?*

“Is it Lancelot?” Arthur asked, a coil of cold clamping around his throat. He picked up his pace.

*No, _no_ , don’t worry about that. But I’m afraid I can’t specify more precisely right now,* Pellew said.

That was a relief, but not enough for Arthur to slow down as he thought. He was about halfway between his office and his house, and it’d take fifteen minutes to get to either one. Currently he was on a residential street, and the windows in most of the buildings were lit up, but…he paused, took a deep breath, and then turned up the front steps of a large apartment building. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”

He hung up as he walked through the front door. The building had a lobby but no guard, so Arthur proceeded to the elevator, taking it down to the basement. Luckily, the janitor seemed to be elsewhere in the building, so Arthur slipped into the work-room and picked up the phone there.

*That was quick,* Pellew said.

“It’s a ground line, but I picked it at random. Is that secure enough?” Arthur angled himself behind the door so he could deal with the janitor if he had to. He hoped he wouldn’t; he already was hating how he was falling back on old habits, and he didn’t want to ruin some innocent man’s night. “Why are you concerned about that?”

Pellew sighed. *I am sorry about this, but friends in London say that you’re in a delicate situation. But I thought you should know—Benedict Clayton suffered a fatal heart attack two hours ago while in protective custody. Lancelot’s out in the field and he’ll be told as soon as we can contact him, and so will Guinevere.*

“What kind of heart attack? He didn’t have any pre-existing conditions…that I remember.” It’d been several years, and when they’d recently met, it hadn’t been under conditions that would’ve let them catch up on each other. But that would be the optimistic explanation, and right now Arthur wasn’t feeling much of that emotion.

*I…the preliminary coroner’s report will be back in two days. But my gut tells me that it wasn’t natural.* The other man paused, then coughed. *I’d like to talk to you sometime soon. Not as a suspect in his case, but with regards to fall-out from it.*

Arthur briefly closed his eyes. “I may be busy. But thank you for the offer. And thank you for calling.”

The longer he stayed, the more he risked not only being found by someone, but also letting anyone already watching him try to intercept his call. He did hang up, but afterward, he stood by the phone for a few minutes and thought. Then he gave himself a hard shake and warily headed back upstairs.

He’d had plenty of time to think. They’d given him months, and by now he should’ve arrived at a decision.

He had. The problem was just bringing himself to carry it out.

After another useless few minutes loitering on the sidewalk, Arthur turned around and headed home. They’d probably give him a week at least; they wouldn’t be stupid enough to risk dealing with him and Clayton both at the same time. It was too obvious that too many people with too many agendas were watching him.

* * *

Lancelot got the news about Clayton about three minutes after he’d stepped into the house; it’d been that long because he’d dropped his cell down a sewer grating after a last-minute offer to help out a colleague turned into a seven-block foot chase. But even before that, he’d guessed something was up. Arthur had been sitting in the living room with the lights off, and he’d scared the hell out of Lancelot when Lancelot had absently turned them on and looked in on his way to the kitchen.

Of course, the other man hadn’t brought it up. He’d just blinked and looked like Lancelot as if he were a little confused why people didn’t normally sit in the dark by themselves. Then he’d asked what Lancelot wanted for dinner.

“I’m worn out. What’s fastest?” Lancelot’s mouth had replied.

“I think Guinevere left something in Tupperware,” Arthur had said.

Typical. She didn’t think they could fend for themselves, so she’d made them a nice precooked dinner. As if they didn’t live in New York City, the greatest place for take-out food in the world, and never mind that before Arthur had come along, Lancelot had kept up his half of the cooking schedule without much complaint from her. He should’ve rung her up just to tease her about how she defaulted back to the old mother-hen stereotype no matter how modern she thought she was.

Instead they reheated the damned food. Which was good. Arthur even managed to carry on a half-convincing conversation about the difficulties he was having with workplace politics. Lancelot told himself that fighting on an empty stomach was a stupid idea and the British Navy had never done it if it could’ve helped it, so obviously there was something to that.

They were washing the dishes when it finally came out. “Have you heard from Guinevere yet?” Arthur asked.

And Lancelot dropped the glass he was holding. He cursed and swooped down, managing to get his soapy fingers on it, but it slipped out again and knocked against the edge of the counter, then fell to shatter on the floor. “Goddamn it.”

“Wait—don’t move. I’ll get the dustpan and broom.” Arthur was still wearing shoes. He usually ended up prepared for an unexpected situation like that.

Lancelot grimaced, looking at his own bare feet. He checked his hand for any cuts, but he wasn’t injured. “She got to London all right. If I know her, either her parents dragged her off to some late dinner party where she can’t check her phone, or they went home and she went to bed so she wouldn’t have to make small-talk with them. She probably hasn’t heard yet.”

The dustpan and the broom were in the next room, and Arthur went and got them without breaking in stride. Though when he came back, he dropped down to begin sweeping so that his eyes never looked up at Lancelot. “Right. Your boss called me and told me.”

“Oh. I would’ve thought you’d have Tristan monitoring the situation, and heard that way,” Lancelot snapped. He curled in his toes as the hand-broom got near them, and then he thought he might as well curl his fingers as well.

“Did he go into any detail with you? We didn’t have the time to, and anyway, I don’t think he would’ve felt comfortable divulging more information to me.” Arthur was maddeningly calm.

That, Lancelot decided, was a bad sign. A worried or depressed Arthur was considerably easier to predict, given that he could be provoked into making his internal debate external, and furthermore, was an indecisive Arthur. A calm Arthur was one who’d made up his mind and that never was a good thing when he was cutting other people out of the loop.

“I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me we can go into the living room to talk about it and I don’t have to seriously think about locking the windows and doors. To keep you in,” Lancelot finally said.

A little bit of glass suddenly spun out from under the broom’s bristles. Then Arthur knelt up to meet Lancelot’s eyes, and his expression was more stunned than anything else. “Do I really make you this paranoid?”

Lancelot opened his mouth to say obviously, then shut it. He nearly stepped backwards before he remembered about the broken glass all over the floor. “Don’t turn this into a guilt trip, damn it.”

Arthur winced, then resumed cleaning up glass with jerky, quick movements. Several times he had to go over the same spot twice because he’d brushed so hard the bits had jumped right out of the dustpan. “I gave Clayton to Interpol to save his life. Now he’s dead and all I managed to do was basically just delay the inevitable, and I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you, but I think regretting that’s only human of me.”

Which wasn’t what Lancelot had been talking about, and frankly, not an angle he would’ve considered on his own. From his point of view, Arthur had done everything possible to help out a man who didn’t even really deserve it. And he started to say so, only he couldn’t help but notice the faint tremble in Arthur’s shoulders.

The shaking rapidly grew in strength, and after a moment, Arthur put down the hand-broom. He immediately picked it up again and finished sweeping, then twisted around to dump the glass in the wastebasket. Then he got up and stalked into the next room.

He’d already put away the broom and pan by the time Lancelot rounded the corner. His hands were coming up to cover his face, but he lowered them when he heard Lancelot come in; his eyes were red and wet.

“Oh, Christ,” Lancelot sighed. He put out his hands and took Arthur’s face between them.

Lancelot didn’t even really have to pull: Arthur fell onto him, a hot dampness wetting through Lancelot’s shirt to his shoulder as Arthur brought his hands around to clutch at his back. The shake was still in his body, and it was to Arthur what loud sobs would’ve been to anyone else. Because Arthur didn’t make a sound, and because he was pressed so closely to Lancelot, Lancelot could feel exactly how much effort that took.

Part of his damned training coming back, Lancelot bitterly thought. Though he tried to stroke Arthur’s shoulders and back as gently as he could, not quite sure what might be too much pressure. “It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s ours. Hell, mine. You made it pretty clear what MI6 would try, and it was our responsibility to keep them from getting to Clayton.”

“I gave him to you. I grounded him,” Arthur whispered. “If I’d let him go free, he—”

“If you’d done that, Guin and I would be back to ground-zero with trying to take out part of the blood diamond trade, and god _damn_ it, that funds genocidal _wars_. That’s about more people than your bloody spy-school friends.” Lancelot flattened his hands on Arthur’s back in an attempt to keep from shaking the other man. His lip hurt, and after a moment he realized why and made himself take his teeth out of it. “And besides, if you’d left him alone…don’t lie to yourself, Arthur. I spent hours with the man taking his deposition. He was more of a passive suicide than Anna Karenina.”

For a moment, he thought he’d gone too far. Arthur stiffened, his fingers going rigid so that a hairsbreadth of space opened up them and Lancelot’s back. Then he collapsed back against Lancelot, his breath shivering in half a grim laugh by Lancelot’s ear. It wasn’t as far as relaxing, but it was better than Lancelot had been expecting. “Anna Karenina.”

“One New Year’s, I’d just been dumped and Guin had botched a case, and so we got drunk and rented a lot of bad book-to-movie adaptations. Guin had a thing for Sean Bean back then,” Lancelot muttered, rubbing his flushing cheek against the side of Arthur’s head. “Hated that film. Wanted everyone to just bloody _die_ already, but only Anna ended up getting it.”

“You would.” The hands on Lancelot’s back pressed down hard, almost to the point of pain. They let up after a moment, but only to start moving firmly downwards, their intent so obvious that an eighty-year-old virgin monk could’ve guessed.

After a moment, Lancelot bent backwards so he could look Arthur in the eye. He didn’t quite get there before the other man dove in and caught up his mouth, lips and tongue fervent and desperate and irresistible. Arthur groaned, eased off and then came down again at a different angle, kissing open-mouthed and hard. His skin was feverishly warm, and suddenly his hands were running over Lancelot’s body like he wanted to sink right into it, peel Lancelot apart and then wrap himself inside.

Lancelot wasn’t an idiot, and he hadn’t lost track of the conversation. This wasn’t what they should be doing right now—at least, not if they wanted to come up with a practical response to the whole Clayton mess with which they both could live. But the thing was—and it was as clear as a glass prism to him—Arthur really _needed_ this. And that was it.

He put his arms up around Arthur’s neck and kissed back, at first trying to meet the other man halfway, but Arthur just ran roughshod over his attempts, almost trying to swallow Lancelot’s jaw, and finally Lancelot just opened his mouth and gave the other man something to press against. Arthur’s tongue lashed in and out of it, trailing wet streaks from Lancelot’s lips down his throat, and they should’ve been cold, but instead they were scorching hot. They left his skin feeling blistered.

Arthur suddenly tucked his head down and pressed his face into the crook of Lancelot’s neck. He took a deep, harsh breath, and Lancelot began to ask what was the matter, but then Arthur bit down and a groan came out of Lancelot’s mouth instead. Half his shirt was unbuttoned by the time he finished, and the way Arthur’s hands were ripping at his clothes said the other half wasn’t about to last long.

There just wasn’t any keeping up with Arthur. He had Lancelot stripped and shoved up against the wall while Lancelot was still gasping for air, his hand already working mercilessly between Lancelot’s legs. His head was still down pinched between Lancelot’s head and shoulder, and his breath was shaky and his lips were moving on the skin of Lancelot’s neck, saying something, giving up words that were smothered away before Lancelot could hear them. Their meaning almost seemed to come through, so intense that he could feel them pulsing up along his veins, but they were too blurred. His vision was blurring, the clarity of the world narrowed down to the way the shoulder-seams of Arthur’s shirt were digging across his palms; he could feel the breaks in the double line of stitching, the strands stretching as they soaked up the sweat from his clenched hands.

Arthur fucked him like it would save the world, hard and intense and yet drifting somewhere past Lancelot, focus going into the dark looming up behind them. Lancelot cursed at him, gouging his shoulders till either Arthur could bleed or look at him, and then Arthur came back to him. But not for long, and Lancelot couldn’t keep fighting, not with what Arthur was doing to him.

He held out for as long as he could. And then he went under, screaming into Arthur’s ear the whole way.

* * *

“Did that help any?” The hand in Arthur’s hair slowed, then dipped to slide off the back of his neck. Lancelot gave him a little shake. “Because if you want another round of therapy, I’m going to have to suggest we move upstairs. I don’t think my legs will stand for much more than horizontal right now.”

After a moment, Arthur felt his mouth slowly move into a smile against Lancelot’s shoulder. He lifted his head, then pulled his arms out from between them and put his hands down on the floor for support as he got off his knees.

Though when he finally looked at Lancelot, his smile died. Once he’d gotten out of the way, Lancelot had let his arms drop to lie across his knees; his head was tilted back to rest against the wall and he was staring moodily at Arthur. As if they’d just started having a fight.

“Look, don’t—” Lancelot started, sitting up. He flinched, then put his palms on the floor and carefully shifted his weight off his arse. “Arthur, I was fine with doing that, all right? If you needed to do it—I just can’t exactly enjoy fucking when it’s not about me. I’m selfish like that.”

“You’re not selfish,” Arthur said. He reached out, but at the last minute, changed his mind and stroked the back of his hand down Lancelot’s cheek instead of cupping it.

Lancelot smiled wryly as he turned his head into it. “You should be a lot more than you are. But anyway, do you feel better?”

“I feel like…” Arthur withdrew his hand and thought a moment. Then he got up and offered a hand to Lancelot, who took it and used it to heave himself up instead of waiting for Arthur to pull. He needed a minute to deal with his clothes, so Arthur waited. “Did you want me to start the espresso machine while I was at it, or are you fine?”

“No, I think I’m all right. Though someday we really need to talk about this tea thing of yours. There’s being British and then there’s taking the cover too far,” Lancelot commented. At the last bit, he flicked a look over that was slightly wary.

Instead of responding to it, Arthur went back to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. He was measuring out the loose-leaf into the teapot when he heard Lancelot pad in behind him.

“I refuse to get side-tracked by your…damn it, any more and we’ll have to start numbering your guilt-trips for easy reference.” Lancelot paused, then abruptly turned to lean against Arthur’s back, wrapping his arms around to hook in front of Arthur’s stomach. “It’s not just beating yourself up over Clayton that’s on your mind. First the problem with Tristan’s old advisor, and then this. They’re ramping it up.”

“They’re not going to kill me,” Arthur said. He startled a little when the kettle sang out.

He had to reach down and pull Lancelot’s hands apart so he could get to it, but Lancelot gave him a sharp look on the way. And then immediately returned his arms to Arthur’s waist as soon as the hot water had been poured. “Arthur, I work for _Interpol_. I’m not going to buy that. They’re obviously doing this by degrees, and—”

“And the logical next step is to go after you or Guinevere. If they thought they could tolerate the consequences of killing me, or that the pros would be worth the cons, then they would have done it already. Individuals torture for the sake of torture; government agencies have to justify the expense of an extended mind-game like this to the accountants.” It came out of Arthur in a rush, and after he’d finished, he just stood there in surprise at himself. Then he swore, jerking his hand away from the teapot’s sides as its heat finally registered.

Lancelot had gone stiff and still against him, and when the other man finally moved, it was to tighten his grip on Arthur. “Well, Pellew’s ex-MI6 himself, isn’t he? He’d know what to look for. And you—you’d know right away.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s enough of a deterrent,” Arthur said after a moment. He checked the time, then poured himself a cup of tea. “That’s the problem with being out of the loop. I don’t know enough about how they’re positioned in the world, about what the internal politics are like…I’m not sure why they’re being so cagey with me.”

“Would they want you back?” Rubbing his face against Arthur’s shoulder, Lancelot stretched his arm around to pull the other cup and saucer Arthur had gotten out towards him. He took the cup off and put it on the counter, then poured himself some tea. “I don’t know how much longer you can play a waiting game. For that matter, I’m not sure _how_ you’re managing to be so patient. If it were me—”

Arthur took a sip, then lowered his cup to stare at the amber liquid inside. A few flecks of black had made it through the spout and slowly swirled about the bottom, though they didn’t remotely give him a clue as to his future. “To be brutally honest, I’m not waiting. I’m procrastinating. I don’t want to give up teaching, I don’t want to resign from Avalon, I don’t—I don’t want to see my work on creating a new discipline within the philosophy department here go to waste. And then I have-- _damn_ it, another year and I would’ve had Gawain and Galahad out, I think.”

Lancelot didn’t say anything. After a minute or so, he did move to lean against Arthur’s side, pushing up at Arthur’s arm. He ducked and slotted himself under it, then turned to keep it crooked around himself. His fingers poked at his cup, pushing it around the corner.

“For seven years I didn’t have a life. I went in, carried out a mission, and then picked up and moved to the next one. Now I’ve had the time to build something here, and I just—I don’t want to give it up,” Arthur quietly said. He idly tapped the bottom of his cup against the counter, then picked it up and cradled it in his palm. “A house, a career, dinners with friends and a library arranged the way I want it…they’re all such material things. They shouldn’t matter so much in the end—I shouldn’t care so much, after what I’ve learned—but they do.”

The other man stirred, tilting his head so its weight fell on Arthur’s shoulder. “Arthur, what have you decided to do? It sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

“I have.” After a long, long time, with much agonizing and debating, and God, he was so very thankful that Lancelot and Guinevere had allowed him the time and space for it. He’d needed all his energy and focus to straighten out his own mind, and he knew that distraction had done more than bothered the other two.

They deserved much better than him, but they’d waited nonetheless. That kind of commitment…it demanded an equal amount of return.

“Well?” Lancelot said after a moment, a touch of impatience filtering into his voice.

It should’ve been amusing to see Lancelot’s core personality reassert itself, no matter the situation. Instead Arthur found the corners of his eyes stinging a little bit. “I can’t stay a civilian, that much is clear. I don’t know what MI6’s motives are, but they obviously aren’t going to let me remain as I am. I can keep them off and can deal with any threat they might make to me or you or Guinevere, but not without sacrificing my life here.”

He expected Lancelot to ask him exactly what he meant by not staying a civilian, but instead the other man stepped away, dropping his arms from Arthur. In a rare moment of perfect etiquette, Lancelot picked up both cup and saucer and pensively, silently drank. He dropped the cup once from his mouth as if about to say something, but then apparently changed his mind.

Arthur finished his own tea and poured himself a second cup. “I don’t blame either of you.”

It was a shot in the dark, but from the way Lancelot’s shoulders sharply hitched, it hit home. He jerked the saucer down, only keeping it from shattering against the counter by sticking his finger out beneath it. “I know you don’t. But it’d be a lot easier to make your decision if you didn’t have to worry about us, wouldn’t it? Tristan’s used to all that, having to cut things out for the sake of—”

“He won’t do that anymore,” Arthur interrupted. He paused to collect his thoughts, surprised at his sudden flash of anger. Though it made a little more sense once he backtacked his train of thought. “I hope—I’m going to try very hard to limit this to me, but if it goes beyond to him, I don’t think he’ll run. This is ground where he’ll stand—his mother was the same way, in the end.”

“I thought he and Gawain were a bit rocky right now.” Lancelot glanced up to make sure his comment was taken as a statement and not an attack.

By this time, the tea had cooled too much and it tasted bitter on Arthur’s tongue. He put his cup down, then picked up the pot and walked it over to the sink to empty it. “It doesn’t matter. Personally, I think Gawain might be it for Tristan, but whatever happens to their relationship, Tristan’s reached the point where his interest isn’t in preserving his principles by any means necessary. He’ll fight for them instead.”

He could watch Lancelot put everything together in his head. “Same for you. Arthur, it doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t survive—”

“It doesn’t mean a damn thing if I live and I have to leave either of you.” Arthur briefly clamped his lips together. Then he shook his head, laughing humorlessly. “It wouldn’t really be leaving, anyway—I’m almost thirty-eight and I won’t lie to myself. I wouldn’t be able to stay away. So I can’t run. Staying and meeting MI6 head-on might result in my death, but those are odds I’ll have to take. There’s no one-hundred-percent safe solution here for me.”

Lancelot’s mouth twisted. He stared down into his cup as if he was trying to make it boil with his gaze alone, then delicately put cup and saucer down. He backed up, lifted his arms as if to push off an invisible vertical surface, and then violently spun around to kick the refrigerator. Then he did it again.

The first time Arthur reached for him, he jerked away. Then he turned and seized Arthur’s hand, then Arthur’s elbow and pulled himself into Arthur for a hard embrace. “I’m sorry,” he said, spitting out the words as if he were swearing. He pressed his forehead against Arthur’s shoulder, slowly slumping. “I—listen, we’ll be worth it. I swear to God, we’ll…I’ll make it up to you, at the very least.”

The self-castigation in Lancelot’s voice made Arthur wince. He wrapped his arms around the other man and buried his nose in Lancelot’s curls, taking a deep breath. “You fell in love with me. I’m still trying to make sure you don’t regret it.”

Lancelot made a choked, half-laughing sound and tightened his grip on Arthur. He raised his head after a moment, but only far enough to put his mouth against Arthur’s mouth, and then he was sliding down to his knees. He pushed away Arthur’s hands when Arthur reached for him, and finally Arthur let him do it how he wanted to.

* * *

It took a long time for Lancelot to finally fall asleep, and even then he stayed so tensely pressed against Arthur that Arthur needed a good twenty minutes to ease himself away. He paused at the edge of the bed, looking at the little lines around the other man’s mouth and eyes—Lancelot was much too young to be getting those already—before he soundlessly walked over to the closet to get dressed.

He did take his cell-phone with him. With Guinevere, stress often manifested herself as restless sleep and so he wasn’t expecting her to make it through the whole first night back at her parents without waking up once. And when she did wake up, her first impulse would be to check on work; he just had his fingers crossed that she would call his cell and not the house, which would wake up Lancelot.

His coat-pocket emitted a muffled jingling noise just as he’d crossed into the fringes of Chelsea. He still had a little time to kill, so he stopped in what looked like a quiet doorway and answered it. “Guinevere?”

*Where are you?*

“Walking around Chelsea. Lancelot’s at home, sleeping.” Arthur absently glanced out across the street, checking the windows of the buildings on that side. “I wish I’d had a little while longer. I’ll have to leave the reorganizing of the philosophy department before it’s done, and I’m not sure if any of my colleagues will see the changes all the way through.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, long enough for Arthur to picture Guinevere sitting at a desk, her hair falling from where it’d been loosely tucked behind her ear, her hand on the side of her bent head. She’d be able to think objectively and figure out how he’d weighed up his options and their pros and cons, but he could tell from the way she sucked in the occasional breath that she wasn’t completely comfortable with all of it. She wasn’t keeping all of her emotions out of it.

*How long have you had your mind made up?* Guinevere finally asked.

“Since a little after Kernyw handed in his resignation.” The following silence seemed a little confused, so Arthur clarified just in case Guinevere didn’t remember. “Tristan’s advisor, the one outed for improper relations with—”

*His industry-connected girlfriend, right.* Guinevere inhaled deeply, then took so much time to exhale that it began to worry Arthur. *So is the delay strategic, or—*

Arthur looked at his watch, then resumed watching people walk by on the sidewalk. It was a much busier night than he’d been expecting, considering the day. Then again, it was past dinner hour so some people might’ve chosen to recover from their families by going out. And possibly he was absorbing a little bit of Guinevere’s bitterness. “No, I just didn’t want—you know, after I quit, I originally decided to try being an academic next because of the access to research facilities. But…I’ve really come to love it.”

*I’d say that we could help hold them off till you’ve wrapped up your affairs, but that’s not what you would’ve wanted anyway,* Guinevere slowly replied. Her voice was tight and strained. *When?*

“Well, I can’t quite set a timetable—”

*Did you leave this for when I’d be out of the country? You said Lancelot’s asleep—God, I knew I should’ve called home first,” Guinevere suddenly snapped, all the words rushing out. Their intensity whipcracked over the slight static. “I _knew_ \--but I thought, if I wanted to contact Arthur the quickest…but is it contacting you, or is it—”

Arthur looked around again, then forced himself to calm down. “Guinevere—”

*I know, I know, you weren’t waiting for Clayton’s death. You aren’t anywhere that ghoulish. But you knew it was leading up to that, and it is useful for pointing to and saying that you can’t—*

“Guinevere, if I were running away, I wouldn’t have told you I was in Chelsea. For that matter, I wouldn’t have left Lancelot asleep. He would have picked up on it and I would’ve had to _drug_ him or something of that sort.” A little bit of black humor was creeping into Arthur’s voice, and when he tried to suppress it, he could feel it start to turn hysterical on him. “Though I’m not sure I could follow through with that now. I’m getting old—I can’t get back the edge I used to have.”

*Well, I don’t think you want it back, do you?* Her voice was still edged with nerves, but it sounded as if she’d relaxed a little. Enough to not be leaping off her seat for another phone and a call to Lancelot or possibly back to the New York branch of Interpol. *Arthur, I…just…all right, I just want to know what you’re doing and when you’ll be home again. My bloody mum’s forcing me to go visit all her tea-time friends tomorrow, so I’d like to know I can at least call you to complain after it’s over.*

After a moment, he did take the risk of smiling at that; she was forcing the humor over the worry in her voice, but she was also telling him…“I’m working on wrapping up my affairs,” he said. He heard his voice catch, but talked through it. “I’m going home straight after, and with any luck, Lancelot will only have gotten to putting on his shoes, and we can have our fight in the foyer. It’s a bit chilly out right now.”

*Sometimes I hate the whole stiff-upper-lip nonsense more than anything else,* Guinevere sighed. She almost said something else, cut herself off, and then took a deep breath. When she spoke again, she sounded terribly young and frightened, all her composure shorn away, and still so very determined. *I just lied back there. I want to know you’re home, I want to know you’re safe from everything, I want to know Lancelot’s doing his octopus impression so at least I’ll be certain you’re not going everywhere. But I—look, Arthur, I trust you.* She laughed a little. *I’m having such a hard time overriding my instincts right now—you’re damn lucky I’m overseas.*

“I know I’m lucky,” Arthur quietly replied.

After another second, Guinevere made an irritated, drawn-out noise. Then her voice suddenly, fiercely sang out down the line. *I _love_ you, you stupid man. I—good night.*

A click and then the dial tone followed. Arthur blinked, a little shell-shocked, and then slowly put his cell phone away. He happened to glance down the street as he did and he spotted Pellew walking towards him.

The other man saw him, but didn’t make any sign of recognition. Pellew turned into a coffeeshop; Arthur casually followed after retucking his coat around himself.

* * *

Guinevere stayed up. It was only another two hours till her parents preferred their breakfast, and when she looked out the window, she could already tell that the sky was lightening. Then again, that might have been the light pollution from the downtown area. Everything seemed to be a little artificial nowadays.

She chewed on her nails. Methodically, thoroughly, biting each one down so the same sliver-width of white above the quick was left, and for once she didn’t feel disgusted with it or annoyed at her weakness. Actually, she was a little frustrated that she didn’t have more nails to bite.

Her cell buzzed just as she finally reached to pick it up. She checked the CallerID, had a moment of shock, and then answered. “Did you run out yet, or are you on your way to do that?”

*What—oh. You called…or did he call you? No, I’ll go with you calling him,* Lancelot said. He slurred the first few words a little, as if he hadn’t yet fully woken. *I’m still in bed. I thought about running out, believe me, but…well, what did you two talk about?*

“I’m thinking of flying back early. I’ve been staring at the booking website for the past half-hour.” It’d cost an arm and a leg, and she’d probably have to improperly use her Interpol status in order to get a seat at this late notice, but she was more than willing to bear those costs.

Lancelot cursed as he banged something. *Don’t. We go into panic mode, or look like we’re going into panic mode, and then they’ve got us right there. Actually, I—is there any possible way you could start sleeping at the London office?*

“I’d love to, given that my mother and father don’t have the security clearance to get to me there, but somehow I doubt that I could do that without having to give some kind of explanation. And then that’d be giving away Arthur’s hand, whatever that is,” Guinevere replied, putting her hand up. She cradled her forehead against it, then jerked her head up when she heard a noise.

It was only the newspaper boy, but nevertheless, she ended up moving to sit on the floor, below the level of the windowsill. She hated being so damned paranoid—hated the way she had to rearrange her life in response to someone else—but Arthur was putting his faith in her to do that. He hadn’t come out and said so, but if he thought she couldn’t see to herself, then he would’ve…done something stupid to try and protect her before he protected himself.

Of course, she didn’t absolutely know for certain that that wasn’t what he was doing right now, but that was where she had to believe in him. “I hate tests of faith.”

*Well, at least you can reason that you’re five hours’ flying away. I have to sit here and tell myself that there’s no way I can go out and do anything without risking that I’ll mess up his plans. It’s bloody—God, I wish he’d drugged me,* Lancelot said, the last words coming out on the end of an explosive sigh. In the background, a rhythmic drumming noise—probably his fingers on the wall—could be heard. *I let him go off without getting specifics out of him.*

Guinevere thought she heard a little bit of a question in that and had to shake her head. “Were you hoping that I’d somehow manage to do better over a trans-Atlantic phone-call? While he was on his way to…”

*For once, yes. You’re a stone-cold bitch queen when it comes to interrogation, damn it, so didn’t you?* Pause. *Oh, wonderful. Guin, really. This was not a good time to decide you don’t need to be a professional.*

“ _Lance_ , it’s Arthur, not some international criminal who I’d love to personally post-mortem. And it’s—” She pressed her hand against the side of her head, closing her eyes against what she thought was a developing headache. Bloody Thanksgiving break—what a stupid American custom. If it hadn’t been around, her parents would’ve had no reason to guilt-trip her into coming home before Christmas, and she wouldn’t be kicking her heels now, waiting to see what happened. “He’s already doing this for us. I don’t know how much more we could possibly interfere in his life.”

*Since when did you feel guilty about that? Isn’t this the same woman who regularly changes his tea brand and cell phone ringtones?* Lancelot snorted.

Guinevere rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an ass.”

*Well, how else do you suggest I cope?* Probably a little more truth than Lancelot wanted getting out sneaked into that statement, to judge by the uncomfortable laugh he let out afterward. *I just can’t believe I didn’t push the point. I’m dying to know. It’s not like I feel bad about nagging him over it, and still…*

“I want a cigarette.” So badly that when she looked at her hand, her fingers were crooked as if she were holding one. The craving came out of nowhere and almost immediately blew up into a want so strong she could practically taste the nicotine stinging her tongue.

Lancelot made a rude noise into the phone. Then he got up, and she could hear him moving around, rattling drawers. The extra noises stopped after a moment—and then she heard the distinctive click of a cigarette lighter. *Ah. There we go. I knew I still had a few somewhere around here.*

“You _prick_.”

*Don’t worry, Guin. I’m smoking for you, too.*

“I should fly home just to slap you for that,” Guinevere muttered. “You know why you didn’t push the issue? Because you already know that Arthur’s coming back to us, and because you’re not going to change. You’ve got your life and you’re keeping it as is, and he’s changing his life to make sure of that, and even though we’re all adults and respectful of each other’s right to make their own choices about sacrifices—”

* _Firstly_ ,* Lancelot started in a heated tone. Then he coughed, and then he sounded like he was really choking. He did get himself under control before Guinevere got truly worried, muttering something about it being a damn long time since he’d been driven to smoke, and continued in a calmer but no less pointed voice. *That ‘you’ is plural—you’re talking as much about me as about you. Secondly, we’ll have to change too. It’s one thing to be living with some college professor, and another to be living with someone who’s got overt ties to the intelligence community.*

Guinevere opened her mouth, then closed it and got up. She slinked past her parents bedroom—having flashbacks of sixth form all the way—and headed down to the kitchen. At least she could make herself some coffee. “All right, I’m a bit off right now and I don’t have it all right. But tell me I’m wrong about you being sorry Arthur’s the one making the biggest sacrifice.”

*Of course I’m sorry! I’m sorry he’s losing what’s probably the perfect job for him, but you know what? He _is_ choosing to do it. And more than being sorry—I’m fucking _angry_ because I am _not_ his cross. I’m not his damned excuse to martyr himself and I refuse to be the weakness that took him down. I absolutely goddamn refu-- _fuck_.* Something clattered loudly in the background. Then Lancelot cursed again, sounding like he was in some pain. *I just tried to put out my cigarette on my own damn arm. God, I hate how confused he makes me.*

“You don’t want to know what he’s really doing because then you can honestly say he did it all himself,” Guinevere said. She leaned against the edge of the kitchen counter as she started filling the coffeemaker. “You selfish idiot. I hope you did burn yourself. I didn’t ask because he said he was staying with us, and I’m going to believe that. And I remembered that we told him we’d let him tell us things when he felt comfortable. This is hard, but—if Arthur can go through the trouble of reinventing himself a third time, then I think I can wait a few weeks to ask him how he did it.”

Lancelot didn’t have anything to say back to that, apparently. He occasionally let out a loud, harsh exhale, but from when Guinevere turned on the coffeemaker to when the pot was half-full of coffee, he was silent.

*Well, I can’t run out after him because that’s exactly what happens in the movies and it always ends up being a mistake that results in an extra twenty minutes, and you tend to go into incredibly nasty rants at the characters at that point. And apparently I can’t just sit and wait for him, because then I’m selfish. So what, exactly, am I supposed to do?* Lancelot finally asked.

The coffee seemed to have finished dripping, so Guinevere started looking for mugs. Every time she came back to visit her parents, she had to relearn where everything was. “I don’t know, damn it. It’s not about what you do—it’s about why you do it, and…and damn it, apparently your parents do always wake up at the worst times.”

From the sound of things, Guinevere’s mother would still be hung up in the bathroom for another good ten minutes, but her father was going to be down in the next minute. And she’d have to put on her nice face, and try to explain why she couldn’t have stuck with a job that wasn’t “dangerous,” and all while being desperately worried about Arthur, the “non-dangerous” boyfriend they were hoping she married. God.

*What—oh, you mean your parents. Are they awake?* Lancelot’s voice faded as he moved away from the phone to do something. Then its volume went up again. *Look, I’ll…call you back when Arthur gets in. Or if he doesn’t. I…don’t have a nervous breakdown or anything, Guin. If I have to break in a new partner on top of all this, I might just kill someone.*

“‘Break in’? Excuse me, but—”

And then he hung up on her. After a moment, Guinevere let out an exasperated sigh and put the cell phone down on the counter. She rested her elbows on either side of it and propped her chin up on her hand, staring at the coffeepot. It took her a second to remember exactly what she’d been doing with that, and then her father called out a ‘good morning’ just as she reached for it, so she had to turn around instead and greet him.

She didn’t think she was going to make it till Lancelot called, if he even did remember to. If she made it to lunch without phoning, it’d be a bloody miracle.

* * *

Arthur locked the front door, then bent down to take off his shoes. He took off his right shoe and put it aside, then shifted to deal with his other shoe and glimpsed something on the stairs. He stiffened. “Lancelot?”

“I loved the note,” the other man dryly said, holding out a little piece of paper at arm’s length. “Especially the bit about calling Tristan and giving him this code statement if you’re not back before a certain time.”

Lancelot lifted the paper, then pulled it back before Arthur could do anything. He took out a cigarette lighter and held its flame to the scrap till it’d all charred away; the air around him smelled faintly of nicotine and ashes.

“I’m sorry.” There were any number of excuses that Arthur could give, but he opted for none of them. He waited a moment, then went back to taking off his left shoe. Then he stood up and slowly came over to the base of the staircase.

He and Lancelot were about at the same eye-level that way. Lancelot looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head and pulled himself up using the railing. “God, Arthur, I had more than half an idea you were going to. I wasn’t all that sure when, but…and if you chose to go out and do what you did, then I chose to fall asleep instead of staying up. I wasn’t all that sure if you were coming back, and if you were going to leave, then making sure I wasn’t awake meant I’d have no problem being angry at you for it.”

“I—Lancelot, I’ve told you. I’m not—”

“I _know_. Goddamn it, I know, and I’m just…I didn’t really believe you anyway because I’m not that good of a person,” Lancelot said. He tried to smile, like it was a joke, but his voice was cracking and his eyes were dark with pain. “I suppose I’m worse than you are when it comes to paranoia. But— _you came back_.”

He took one step forward, then suddenly lunged the rest of the way, his arms snapping around Arthur as if Arthur had begun to drop through the floor. And then he simply held on. Arthur started to try to say something comforting, but couldn’t think of anything worthy saying. In the end, he just returned the embrace, reassuring the other man as best he could with actions.

“It’s a good thing you have tomorrow off,” Lancelot eventually mumbled, hands clutched in Arthur’s clothing. He lifted his head to stare hard at Arthur, the first sign that he was recovering. “I let you go, so now you’re sitting down and telling me exactly what the game-plan is—wait, let me go get Guin on the speakerphone. Then I won’t have her telling me how bad I am at summarizing later.”

Though he needed another moment before he finally let go of Arthur, and even then his hands drifted to keep in contact with Arthur’s body for much longer than necessary. He went into the next room.

Arthur watched him, then slowly edged into the next room. He found a pad of paper and a pen and leaned his hip against the couch, thinking. Then he slowly raised the pen and began drafting his letter of resignation to Merlin.


	6. The Second Time Around

“It’s seriously driving me crazy. I never realized how small the place really is before this, and I just—I just—God!” Gawain tossed the peppercorns into the pot so hard that a couple of them bounced back out. They plinked off the stove, then fell to roll around his toes.

He moved aside so Tristan, already bending down, could pick them up and reached for the jar of dried chiles and the bottled spices. The workplace was driving him nuts, but for the first time in months, he and Tristan had overlapping vacation time and he wasn’t going to waste it. They were going to have a nice dinner, and some time on the couch while Gawain tried to explain the appeal of watching a college football bowl game, and then later they’d probably fuck like bunnies.

“Good thing I finally took those to the raptor center,” Tristan said. He flicked the dropped peppercorns into the trashcan before moving back to the cutting board. “I never realized how much rabbits in heat smell. Or how loud they can get.”

Gawain blinked, then turned to stare at the other man. Then he shrugged and went back to spicing the broth: Galahad thought that that was pretty creepy, but Gawain could tell Tristan was holding back a grin. It was kind of eerie, but the other man made it cute.

“What’s driving you crazy?” Tristan asked, cutting up carrots. He couldn’t read minds all the time, after all. Which actually would have been frightening.

“Galahad and Mariette. Trying to avoid each other, while also trying to keep up on each other. Well, no, Galahad’s actually just in a funk. Mariette’s the active one.” After a taste, Gawain added some more salt and chili powder. He set the stove for a fast simmer, then went around Tristan to get the chuck roast out of the sink where it’d been defrosting. “She says if Galahad wants space, he can have it. She’s trying to pretend she’s mad at how he took her apology, but she really just wants to talk to him and she’s too scared to, or something. I haven’t really talked to her long enough to figure that out.”

Tristan slid a handful of carrots onto the knife blade and carried them over to the pot, then came back for the rest. He gracefully spun to snag a couple onions on the follow-through. “You’re still mad at her on Galahad’s behalf.”

“Damn straight. And damned if she hasn’t figured that out yet, though I’ve basically done everything except tell her,” Gawain muttered.

“Why not?”

“Because that’d probably make her start avoiding me, and if they ever are going to get over this, they’ve got to keep contact somehow. Arthur and Kitty are staying out of it, which leaves me.” The chuck roast went into the pot and raised the level of the broth dangerously near the rim. With a sigh, Gawain rummaged up a spoon and then started ladling broth into a cup for when the stuff in the pot had boiled down a bit. “I think Galahad’s had plenty of time, and now he’s just depressed because he can’t figure out how to shake himself out of it.”

Tristan didn’t say anything. He chopped up onions with precise efficiency, then moved on to potatoes. Every piece of potato-peel he took off arced straight into the trashcan, and he didn’t seem to have the problem of catching his fingertips on the peeler that Gawain did.

“Don’t think so?” Gawain asked. He glanced at Tristan as he moved over to the sink to wash his hands.

“I haven’t seen him in a while.” Which was Tristan’s way of saying he didn’t. He dealt with the potatoes, then handed the knife to Gawain to rinse off as he dumped the veggies in the pot. “You’ve lived with him. It just doesn’t seem like he’d like somebody shaking him, from how I know him.”

Gawain opened his mouth, changed his mind about what he wanted to say, and slouched against the fridge. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Which is the really hard part about all of this. I just really want to smack both of them on the head, but I can’t do it, can I? I think even telling them about how each other’s doing is pushing it a little, but it’s just driving me—”

“Nuts,” Tristan said. He glanced at Gawain.

A couple months ago, he might’ve just trusted Gawain to get the joke. It was a small but telling reminder that they weren’t picture-perfect yet either. But they were getting there, Gawain told himself. They were talking, they were _trying_.

“Yeah.” He put the knife away and stepped up to the counter to let Tristan get behind him. Then he turned and moved up behind Tristan, wrapping his arms around the other man as Tristan started to wash his hands. He felt Tristan tense up, then relax. Gawain buried his nose in the other man’s hair, rubbing it till he got through to the bare skin.

Tristan stiffened again. “I smell like chemicals.”

“I ever tell you Galahad and I used to work in a car repair garage? Believe me, it smelled way worse there,” Gawain murmured. He unwrapped his arms and reached up to curl his fingers around Tristan’s biceps, then slowly slid them down to the other man’s hands.

They were covered in slick soap that hadn’t yet been worked into a lather. So Gawain helped with that, running his hands over and around Tristan’s, working his fingers in between Tristan’s fingers, curling Tristan’s wrists with his thumbs. Tristan’s body slackened and leaned forward, though he tilted his head back a little. “No, you didn’t. I thought so, though.”

Gawain hummed and kissed the back of Tristan’s neck. There wasn’t any formaldehyde or any of the other stuff Tristan used on the skin, though he could smell traces of it in Tristan’s hair. He pressed his nose down hard against Tristan’s nape to get around that and inhaled deeply; Tristan abruptly twisted his hands around to tightly grasp Gawain’s and draw them under the running water. He gently rubbed down the length of each of Gawain’s fingers with his thumb and forefinger to take off the suds.

“I don’t hate your job. I think it’s cool. I just wish we had more compatible hours, you know. But I know you’re doing what you can—and it shouldn’t be all you,” Gawain said. “I wish my hours were more flexible.”

“They’re already pretty good. I miss being a grad student for that.” Tristan arched so his ass rolled back into Gawain and his throat stretched out so close to Gawain’s mouth…then cursed and twisted, reaching for the stove dials. “Boiling.”

It wasn’t _quite_ spilling all over the place. Thanks to Tristan’s great reflexes—Gawain swore as well and hastily adjusted the heat. By then somebody had thumped on the door and Tristan had gone to check on it, and by the time Tristan had come back, the moment was dead and scrubbed into the floor.

Well, they had the whole evening to revive it, Gawain thought. “Mail?”

“Yeah, I think it’s the dissection kit I ordered.” Instead of opening it, Tristan just dropped it on the dining table. He came back over to stand in front of Gawain. After a second, he lifted his hands to cup Gawain’s face and pull them together for a kiss. “If you want any help about Galahad—”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea. No, they just have to fight it out with each other,” Gawain sighed. Then he reached over and grabbed Tristan’s arms when he felt the other man starting to withdraw. “But thank you for offering.”

“Mmm.” Tristan leaned forward just enough to rest his forehead against Gawain’s. He dropped his hands to Gawain’s shoulders and kneaded them a little, just enough for Gawain to realize he could do with a good massage. “Gawain?”

“Yeah?”

The other man pressed in a little harder, then abruptly ducked so his lips grazed against Gawain’s mouth. “Thank you for…for not asking for space. I think if you had—if you’d wanted to leave it even till the morning, I wouldn’t have come back. And I would’ve regretted it, not being brave enough for that.”

He started to turn away, but Gawain wasn’t going to let him off that easily. Not after hearing something like _that_ ; he grabbed Tristan about the waist and pulled him back, holding him tight enough for the body language to at least get through. He wasn’t about to risk words when they could get messed up so quickly and so easily.

“Good luck to Galahad,” Tristan eventually added. “Him and Mariette.”

“Yeah.” Gawain rested his chin on Tristan’s shoulder. “Yeah. But Galahad’s stubborn as hell, and so’s Mariette. So…I think I believe in them.”

* * *

On some level, Galahad knew that he was taking out his weeks-long bad mood on Jack, and that eventually the poor kid would run out of patience. Deservedly so, and then Galahad would be on the outs with his roommate, his best friend and his…girlfriend. Goddamn it, he wasn’t even sure what to call her now.

“Ah, Galahad? Terribly sorry to interrupt, but have you seen the laundry change—”

Galahad jabbed his finger at the top of the fridge; he’d forgotten to put the stupid jar back after he’d finished making lunch. He’d probably forgotten to put back a lot of the stuff he’d moved when clearing the kitchen counter, but if he got up right now he’d have to punch something. And if he spoke, he’d probably run Jack’s back up against the wall way, way sooner than later.

Fortunately, Jack was tactful and just muttered a thanks as he got the jar. Then he bundled himself, it, and the laundry out the door. He’d be gone for a good couple of hours, so that’d give Galahad some time. Though what exactly Galahad was going to do with it, he wasn’t really sure. Try to work? That’d been doing the trick for a while, but now it just increased his frustration. Sit around and stew in his thoughts? Not really his style; his feet got restless and usually he ended up sucking down a beer, then going out to pick a fight somewhere.

Gawain had put out a standing offer, but it’d be the third time this week if Galahad went over. Besides, all that ever happened then was Tristan lurking around in the background while Gawain prodded, apologized for prodding, and then prodded some more. ‘wain meant well, but he could be just…annoying.

Maybe a change of setting, Galahad thought, and then jumped onto his feet. He wasn’t really that excited about the idea, but suddenly it seemed like even that possibility of some peace would disappear if he didn’t hurry. So he did, and in a record thirteen minutes and five seconds, he was wandering around the Philosophy department, looking for a quiet spot where he didn’t remember making out with Mariette.

He was still looking when he found Arthur scanning a bulletin board in the hall. Galahad politely coughed to let the other man know he was there. “Man, don’t you ever take a vacation?”

Arthur smiled slightly when he saw Galahad, and then a little wider at Galahad’s words. “I did. I just came in for a few hours to wrap up some paperwork—Lancelot and Guinevere are cleaning the whole house as one of their Christmas gifts to me and it’s a bit noisy at home. So what brings you here?”

“Same reason, I guess,” Galahad said.

It didn’t seem like Arthur had anything else to say, so Galahad started to walk on. But then Arthur held up a hand, his smile vanishing and a deeply concerned expression coming onto his face in its place. “If I had something easier to say, I’d call it serendipity. But…can I speak to you for a few minutes?”

“Sure.” Galahad stopped where he was, then frowned when Arthur started off towards the front doors. A nagging, nasty suspicion was beginning to coil up in his gut.

He tried not to let it show. After all, this was his advisor, and his mood wasn’t so bad that he’d turned suicidal. But nevertheless, he couldn’t make himself follow Arthur at quicker than a snail’s pace. Arthur noticed, but typically didn’t comment and instead just adjusted his stride so somehow they were even, despite the couple of inches his legs had on Galahad.

“Sorry to force you outside again, especially with the chilly temperatures,” Arthur said. He looked uneasy and for once, wasn’t really looking Galahad in the eye. The suspicion growing in Galahad began to flower. “But I—well, you may want to raise your voice at me.”

“Look, Arthur, I know you mean well, but I just…it’s okay. I’m okay without it.” Well, not really, but Galahad knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it, and he didn’t need any help with it. He was doing plenty himself—it wasn’t ‘plenty good’ but not every time was a winner.

Arthur frowned and looked sharply at Galahad, his brow creasing. “Pardon? Wait, I don’t think you—”

“Hey, she didn’t ask you to do this, did she? Because oh, my God, way for her to get over her issues. Spring another f—parental interference on me,” Galahad muttered. His temper suddenly surged and he had to dig his nails deep into his thigh to keep from swearing. “I just can’t believe—”

“Oh. Oh, _no_ , no, Galahad. This isn’t about Mariette at all. I’m sorry, I should’ve made that clear earlier,” Arthur interrupted. His expression flashed from relief to sympathy, then settled on regret. He shook his head, a grim smile briefly touching his mouth. “No…I wouldn’t interfere in your private life like that. And Mariette hasn’t…she hasn’t spoken to me at all except to greet me when we pass in the hallways for the past few weeks.”

Ah…shit, was basically Galahad’s state of mind. Like he wasn’t fucking up things enough already, and now he’d just—he grimaced and looked off to the side, feeling embarrassment heat up his cheeks. He scrubbed at one of them, but that just seemed to make his blush worse. “Crap. I’m sorry. I—sorry. So what were you really going to say?”

Silence for a minute or two. When Galahad looked, Arthur was steadily regarding him. Their eyes met and a little puff of cloudy breath popped out of Arthur’s mouth. Then a big one came out as he sighed and rubbed at his nose, which was turning a bit red. “I need to talk to you and Gawain about this as soon as I can, but on the other hand, it’s the kind of problem where I wish I…well, I wish I didn’t have to present you with it at all, but that can’t happen so I had been hoping to at least catch you at a good time.”

“Yeah, well…that’s life,” Galahad shrugged. He met Arthur’s concerned gaze for a few seconds, then shrugged again and dropped his eyes to check out their feet instead. It was so cold that the morning frost was still hanging around on the dead brownish grass. “I’d honestly like to just have it out now. It’s not really a good time for me, but the more advance notice I’ve got, the better I’ll probably be for dealing with whatever it is.”

“All right then.” Arthur hesitated, then seemed to steel himself. “I wrote a resignation letter over the break and I’ve been preparing for the eventuality that I’ll have to use it. Which I suspect will be sooner rather than later. I know this puts you and Gawain in a bad position—I’m speaking to Kitty and to a few members of the department who I trust in order to make sure that my decision affects you as little as possible. You’ve got my word on that.”

Galahad blinked. Reran Arthur’s words through his mind, then blinked again.

“What?” he said. His voice was so quiet he could barely hear himself. So he repeated himself, and this time it was pretty much a shout. “ _What_? What the _hell_?”

Arthur winced. “I’m sorry.”

“I—my fucking God, I’d hope so. You’re _resigning_? Since when? How—how long have you had this letter, and what kind of advance notice is this? I—Jesus Christ, with all due respect, Gawain and me can afford Avalon because _you’re_ the Monmouth Chair and you’ve got that extra money for paying us,” Galahad snapped. He threw up his hands and stamped his right heel into the ground, and with all of that he still had extra rage to burn. “Thanks a fucking _lot_. Thanks for thinking about us.”

At first it looked as if Arthur was going to fold into a major guilt-trip: he actually took a step back from Galahad. But then Galahad ended with flinging his arms back and leaning aggressively forward, and Arthur stopped ceding ground. His jaw tightened and his eyes flashed, and even though his expression overall was still remorseful, something about him told Galahad to shut up.

Of course, right now Galahad was in a totally irrational mood. “It’s not because you want to spend more time at home, is it?”

“No. It’s because I have a choice between resigning or between dragging this college and you into a war with the British Secret Intelligence, and I care too much about both things to do that,” Arthur snapped. “I know you and Gawain are very capable and can handle yourselves, but I don’t think it’s right for me to ask you to fight off trained professionals coming for me.”

Well. That was one way to shut up a person.

Both of them stared at the little tendrils of whitish breath curling from their mouths and nose. When he wasn’t sighing, Arthur seemed to breathe entirely through his nose with no apparent discomfort. On the other hand, the cold was so bad that every couple of seconds, Galahad had to suck air in through his mouth to give his nasal passages a chance to thaw out. Lose the needle-like, painful frost that he could feel forming in them.

“Sorry.” Arthur moodily scanned their surroundings, then looked back at Galahad. “You’ve got reasonable points, and in any case, I shouldn’t lose my temper at you like that. I apologize.”

“So—so do I. I—goddamn it, I’m sorry. It’s just really a shitty time for me right now,” Galahad muttered. He flicked a glance at Arthur, saw forgiveness, and for a moment, felt like the asshole Gawain occasionally called him. “Wow. It’s really that bad? I mean…well, I was lying and an idiot a moment ago. It’s not like Gawain and I haven’t been getting bad vibes from Tristan, though he hasn’t said anything specific…”

Arthur grimaced again. “Tristan actually doesn’t know too much, I think. Which is deliberate on my part—this really shouldn’t be your problem and I’m trying to minimize its effect on all of you as much as possible.”

“Thanks. Really, I’m not being sarcastic this time.” Galahad scuffed at the grass with his foot. “I…thanks, but you know, it’s not going to be the money we miss the most. I guess I’ll be all right since I’m joint anyway and I’ve still got Kitty, but Gawain…well, he’s got the people over at the School of Education. But still…you’ve been a really great advisor.”

A small but brilliant smile appeared on Arthur’s face. For a moment, it looked like he’d begun to tear up as well, but then he blinked and it went away, so maybe it’d just been the stiff breeze. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“Listen…is there anything we can do? I know, I know, we’ve got as much right to interfere in your personal life as you do in ours, but I’d just like to offer…” After all, they’d held up pretty well in that mess that’d started them off with Arthur. Of course, it had been nearly two years since then and New York City life had been relatively peaceful, so Galahad knew he’d be rusty. But there were some things a guy just didn’t forget how to do.

When he and Gawain had left L. A., they’d both sworn never to get trapped in that kind of life again. And he wasn’t planning on it, but still…Jesus, talk about frustration. There was nothing Galahad hated more than seeing a problem and not being able to do anything about it. And he kind of already was having his patience tested about that without bringing Arthur into it.

“No. I appreciate the offer, but no,” Arthur said. He paused, a flicker of uncertainty going over his face. “I’ll try to give you more notice about when the resignation goes into effect. Right now, I estimate a few months, possibly the end of the semester…and Galahad? I know I said I wouldn’t meddle with your life, and it’s entirely up to you what to do with what I say…but it’s possible I’ll have to leave town for a while. Tristan seems as if he’s settled down, so I’ll be asking him to keep an eye on Mariette. I did promise her parents.”

Galahad opened his mouth, but instead of replying right away, just sighed. Things could get so damn complicated despite everybody’s best efforts—but then, Arthur couldn’t even bring himself to ask. “Hey, we’re both Kitty’s grad students. I’m not going to turn into some evil monster bent on driving her out.”

“That wasn’t what I—”

“I know that wasn’t what you meant. Probably not what you were thinking of either, but…well, yeah. Look, worry about yourself, okay? We’re grown adults. Gawain acts like one by default, and I’m—I’m gonna try, I swear,” Galahad said. He mustered up a bit of a cocky smile.

Arthur’s return smile was considerably less strained and more relieved. “Thank you, Galahad. For what it’s worth, you and Gawain are the grad students I think the most of. I’ll…I’ll let you get back to your work now.”

“Wh—oh, yeah. Right.” Galahad awkwardly nodded at Arthur, then turned to walk inside. He paused when he saw that Arthur wasn’t coming along, but the other man was looking in an entirely different direction, and…well, Arthur had his own things to see to. At least he knew what he was going to do.

* * *

Tristan blinked, then rapidly reviewed his memory for the past couple minutes. “Which point conversion are they going for?”

“One-point,” Gawain grinned, putting his head down on Tristan’s shoulder. He stared at the TV in rapt concentration, hand gradually tightening on Tristan’s knee till the ball crossed the line. Then his fingers snapped loose and excitedly rubbed up and down Tristan’s thigh. “Yes!”

College sports had some nice side-benefits, but Tristan still couldn’t see the appeal of the main attraction. But for once they’d had the time to really plan a day and so he was trying to go along with what Gawain wanted to do. The other man had waited long enough for it.

“Hey, thanks for pretending to pay attention.” Gawain seemed to be genuinely amused when Tristan hastily checked on his face. Little sun-wrinkles creased the corners of his eyes when he smiled. “No, it’s okay. I appreciate the effort, you know. Long as I get to lean on you, you can think about new blood-detection staining techniques or whatever.”

Tristan smiled in relief and shifted his shoulder so the bony point of it wasn’t catching Gawain’s head in the temple. “I wasn’t thinking about work, actually. I was thinking about Mariette.”

Cue the surprised, confused look from Gawain. He was startled enough to actually turn away from the TV. Though the roar of the crowd a moment later had him instantly twisted back.

That didn’t mean he’d been totally distracted, of course. “It’s just a little weird. I know about her parental issues, but she’s been in America for a few years now. And even when she was still living in France, she wasn’t afraid to confront anybody besides her parents. Why is she staying away from Galahad?”

“Well, from what I could get from him, he did tell her off pretty strongly,” Gawain muttered after a moment. He shifted uneasily; he wasn’t the kind of person who carried grudges, and being unable to really make peace with Mariette’s actions was bothering him quite a bit. “Give Galahad some credit—he might act like he really does have dandelion fluff for a head, but he can be pretty damn frightening when he’s pushed to it.”

“Hmmm.” True, but Tristan really had been expecting Mariette to put up more of a fight. They hadn’t gotten along during Arthur’s time at the Sorbonne, but he did respect her. More than he respected her parents, to be honest—he thought they were lucky to exist in the Sorbonne’s stasis chamber of an ivory tower. Anywhere quicker-moving and they’d be having a lot of trouble.

They sat in relative peace for the rest of the quarter, Gawain occasionally lifting his head to lip at Tristan’s cheek-tattoos as he explained some fine point about the game. Tristan absently filed the facts away on the off-chance that they’d ever come in handy—they might; drive-by shootings in college sports seemed to be on the rise—and enjoyed hearing Gawain babble without that slight strain in his voice that he’d had lately.

A marching band spilled onto the field in gaudy colors for the halftime show and Gawain abruptly slouched down so his elbow dug a place for itself in Tristan’s tricep. “I just want Galahad to be happy,” he said. “I can’t make him do things, but I just really want…he doesn’t have a lot of people, you know.”

Tristan could completely understand that.

“And I wonder…because it’s our second year, and we’re halfway through. I think Galahad’s going to finish at least a semester early, and then I wonder what he’s going to do.” Gawain drummed his fingers on Tristan’s knee, then pushed back up to resettle his head in the crook of Tristan’s neck. He whistled low through his teeth. “We moved from L. A. together, but I don’t—I’ll be happy if I just get a teaching position and get to sleep next to you every night. Galahad’s not going to settle for that, though. And he deserves more. He’s good enough.”

“Mariette would be able to keep up with him,” Tristan remarked. She’d need a bit more work in the social skills section, and Tristan had to hide an ironic smile as he had the thought. No, he wasn’t too qualified in that either, but he’d learned how to make do with what he had. He didn’t think she’d picked up the former or figured out the latter yet.

Nod. Then another sigh from Gawain. “He needs somebody to keep up with him. And I can’t do that anymore. I—God, I feel like a mom. I think. I’m guessing this is what parents say when their kids move out.”

“You’ve probably got it right. Arthur was a little bit irritable for the first few months after I moved into my own apartment.” Tristan could grin about that now, though at the time he’d been rapidly approaching the end of his patience. Thankfully, Arthur had had two students complete their dissertations and graduate at the same time, which had distracted him long enough to regain his balance.

Gawain glanced at him. “Really? What’s irritable for Arthur?”

“Calling me to invite me over for dinner when I’m about to do a downtown run, incessantly reorganizing his library and purposefully assigning term papers to a hundred-plus class so he’s got an excuse to be exhausted and on the curt side,” Tristan said. He opened his mouth to add a comment about Arthur’s tendency to collapse asleep on his desk, but spotted a waver on the movement on the TV screen.

He got himself braced just in time to absorb the accidental hits as Gawain, gape-mouthed and wide-eyed, cheered his team on to the touchdown. When the ball hit the end-zone, Gawain threw up his arms and whooped. Then he noticed what else his arms had been doing and more carefully dropped them around Tristan’s neck to give Tristan a long kiss that had a bit too much tongue to be just apologetic. Not that Tristan was in any way objecting. Flush-faced and sparkling-eyed was the way he liked Gawain best.

It didn’t last as long as Tristan liked, though. And he could tell the moment Gawain started getting depressed again by the way the other man leaned heavily against him, like he wouldn’t have minded slipping behind Tristan for a while.

The one thing Arthur did have, irritable or not, that Tristan sometimes envied was the ability to pull out the right speech at a crucial moment. But he did his best. “I…don’t think Galahad likes being unhappy. Some people…they’re more comfortable that way. But he isn’t. So I think he’ll figure out a way.”

“Yeah, I hope so.” Gawain meditatively pushed his nose into Tristan’s neck, then chuckled a little beneath his breath. He laid a soft kiss on the side of Tristan’s jaw. “I think you’re right. It’s just that I’m not sure he’s going to do that any time soon, and…damn it. Well, I can’t do everything for him.”

“You do a lot.” Tristan paused. “Do you want to have him over tomorrow?”

He was rewarded with a brilliant smile, though Gawain shook his head. “Thanks. But no, I think—he’s been over so much that I think now he’s getting annoyed at me and himself about it. Don’t ask me to explain that ‘cause it’s just him. We’ll just have to do things by ourselves.”

“Which isn’t such a bad thing,” Tristan dryly said. He pretended to wince at the elbow-dig he knew Gawain was going to give him. Then he suppressed a sigh as something happened on the TV to get the commentators so excited they were getting ear-piercing screeches out of their microphones.

The game was half-over, and then they had the night and the next day, Tristan told himself. He could put up with it for a little longer.

* * *

If Galahad hadn’t really been in the mood to do work before, the talk with Arthur pretty much sealed the deal. He did make an attempt at it, but gave up after he mistyped his computer password three times and temporarily locked himself out of all the campus computers. Instead he went walking around campus, hoping that if it didn’t clear his head, it at least would get him tired enough for him to get in a good night’s sleep. He hadn’t had one of those in a good long while.

Unfortunately, Avalon wasn’t big enough. Eventually Galahad ran out of campus, and then had to start wandering around the coffeeshops and boutiques and videostores that lay just off-campus, and that was where he screwed up. Maybe it was New York City, metropolis extraordinaire, but irony meant if he looked at enough girls’ heads that looked like Mariette’s, then eventually it was going to be her.

She’d had her back to him so he started to duck around the corner, but his reflection in the storefront window must’ve caught her eye or something. Mariette went stiff. “Galahad?”

He thought about pretending he hadn’t heard her.

She lifted her hand to touch the glass in front of her, then completely turned around. She had her hair back in a ponytail, but it wasn’t tightly pulled back like she usually had it. It looked like it was about two seconds from falling out, with big chunks of hair straggling from it.

Galahad almost grimaced on the outside. He sure as hell was swearing like crazy inside of his head. “I was just walking around.”

“Oh.” Mariette’s fingers slowly curled up so her hand knuckled down against the glass. “So was I.”

“No kidding.” Okay, this was lame. This was really fucking stupid, and now they both had no backbones so that insult couldn’t be thrown around. At the very least, Galahad could be straightforward about this. “I’ve got to go.”

Some comment was lurking in Mariette’s expression, something sharp and hurting and bitter. But instead what she said, in a disappointed tone that stabbed a lot harder than any knife or rant would’ve, was: “Really?”

Of course not. It wasn’t like Galahad was doing anything, other than trying really hard to avoid anything and everything while Arthur’s revelation was still knotting up his head. God, he was getting pissed off at Arthur again. If he could’ve waited maybe a couple more months—but okay, his situation was way worse than the situation in which he was putting Galahad. It was more the circumstances than anything else. But still a fucking pain in the ass. And Galahad had been standing in place and staring blankly off for a good couple of minutes, hadn’t he? Great.

“Galahad? Are…are you okay?” Mariette warily asked, like she might lose a hand or something by doing it.

“Not really.” He did grimace for real this time, hoping she didn’t take that as some kind of opening or anything. Yeah, he wasn’t exactly together right now, and he really could use somebody to talk to about the whole Arthur thing, but…not her.

But the last time he’d went over to Gawain’s, the other man had been going on about finally getting a couple days off with Tristan—who’d pulled the post-Christmas shift, which made even Galahad feel sorry for him—and Galahad just couldn’t break the news to him. He’d be in too good of a mood, and besides, then Galahad would have to tell Tristan too, and Arthur had implied that Tristan wasn’t up to speed. And Tristan was totally not Galahad’s problem and wasn’t going to become his problem, thanks. It probably was better if Arthur told both of them.

“Do you want to go sit down and get a coffee?” Mariette glanced away, pretending to be interested in the storefront display. She rubbed nervously at the frosted glass with her hand. “I mean, you go…by yourself. I just think…you look like you could use it.”

“I probably do,” Galahad admitted. From where he was standing, he could see four coffeeshops that’d do. Not that he was moving towards them or anything. He just—he gave himself a hard shake, then sighed. Nope, life sucked and was complicated and totally not how he would’ve wanted it, but that was it and it couldn’t be ignored.

Arthur was putting him in a bind. He was losing the best advisor he’d had in his life, Gawain wasn’t just his anymore, and he knew right when he’d recognized Mariette’s profile that he still loved her. Assholeric parents and crappy decision-making and feminist temper tantrums and all.

“I miss you,” Mariette abruptly said. She had her chin up and her eyes moist, and after one second of staring straight into Galahad’s eyes, she turned away. “I have to g—”

“Wait,” Galahad called out. He took a step forward, then stopped and hung back on his trailing foot. “I…your ears look like they’re about to fall off as ice cubes. You really should go inside for a while, too.”

She looked back at him, poised on the edge of the curb. A lock of hair fell across her face and she absently pushed it back as she gave a noncommittal shrug. “I suppose…”

“I…” Galahad stared at his feet “…want to go to the same coffeeshop? Listen, I can’t guarantee anything here. I mean, I’m not going to buy you the coffee. But I’ll, y’know, share a table. Or some—I miss you, too.”

Mariette regarded him for a couple seconds without any particular expression on her face. But then, coming from nothing that he could see, she suddenly smiled. Tiny and close-lipped while abruptly looking at the ground, but it was definitely a smile. “You never bought me coffee anyway. I wouldn’t let you.”

“Nope,” Galahad agreed.

“I…okay. Okay,’ Mariette said. She nodded jerkily to herself, then hesitantly stepped away from the curb.

They watched each other till finally Galahad got impatient and took a step forward. A half-second after him, Mariette took a step so they were the same distance apart, and like that they edged their way into the nearest shop. Mariette briefly held the door for him, and he nudged an umbrella rack out of the way with his foot before it would’ve caught the hem of her coat.

They sure as hell weren’t back together, but…he looked at the back of her head and he thought he might not mind if this ended up blindsiding him.


End file.
